Abstract

The lack of adequate treatment for the removal of pollutants from domestic, hospital and industrial effluents has caused great environmental concern. Therefore, there is a need to develop materials that have the capacity to treat these effluents. This work aims to develop and characterize an activated charcoal from olive pomace, which is an agro-industrial residue, for adsorption of Nimesulide in liquid effluent and to evaluate the adsorption kinetics and equilibrium using experimental design. The raw material was oven dried at 105 °C for 24 h, ground, chemically activated in a ratio of 1:0.8:0.2 of olive pomace, zinc chloride and calcium hydroxide and thermally activated by pyrolysis in a reactor of stainless steel at 550 °C for 30 min. The activated carbon was characterized by Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, X-ray Diffractometry (XRD), Brunauer, Emmett and Teller (BET) method, Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), density and zero charge potential analysis. The surface area obtained was 650.9 m2 g−1. The kinetic and isothermal mathematical models that best described the adsorption were PSO and Freundlich and the highest adsorption capacity obtained was 353.27 mg g−1. The results obtained showed the good performance of activated carbon produced from olive pomace as an adsorbent material and demonstrated great potential for removing emerging contaminants such as Nimesulide.

Highlights

  • Pollution of wastewater by pharmaceuticals has generated growing concern

  • Hollow particles, that is a kind of powder contained interior hollow structure. This hollow structure is usually covered by a solid shell, meaning there are empty spaces inside the particles [47,48]

  • The results obtained were satisfactory, with a higher surface area at lower activate temFigure 1 shows the characteristics of ACOP determined by N2 adsorption-desorption

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Summary

Introduction

Pollution of wastewater by pharmaceuticals has generated growing concern. The emerging pollutants are harmful to the environment and human health [1]. The majority of drugs have high solubility in water and are not completely removed in conventional water treatment plants [1,2,5,6]. One of these contaminants is the Nimesulide, which is an anti-inflammatory and is generally prescribed to reduce fever and pain related to rheumatoid arthritis [7]

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