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
Summary
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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