Biosorption of Acridine Orange and Auramine O dyes onto MCM-41 mesoporous silica nanoparticles using high-accuracy UV–Vis partial least squares regression

Abstract

In this study, partial least squares-1 (PLS-1) were proposed as powerful method to simultaneous determination of the residual concentrations of Auramine O (AU) and Acridine Orange (AO) after treatment by MCM-41 mesoporous silica nanoparticles. Room-temperature synthesis of MCM-41 nanoparticles was performed and characterized. The Brunauer, Emmet and Teller surface area and average pore diameter of synthesized MCM-41 were obtained to be 768m2g−1 and 2.0nm, respectively. Results indicated that longer contact times (20min), higher initial concentrations (20mgL−1), lower adsorbent dosages (0.4gL−1) and basic pH (10) results in the best adsorption capacity of MCM-41 with response surface methodology. Moreover, equilibrium studies indicated that the adsorption of both dyes follows the Langmuir isotherm model and adsorption kinetic data fitted well with the pseudo-second order model. The maximum adsorption capacities of 62.5 and 333.0mgg−1 at optimum experimental conditions were obtained for AU and AO, respectively. Finally, performance of the developed model was applied for the removal of AU and AO dyes in river water, real and simulated industrial wastewater at optimum experimental conditions.