Abstract

Tapioca peel, waste from native tapioca starch industry in Thailand, was used for the biosorption of nickel from aqueous solution. The experimental parameter focuses on the influence of contact time, solution pH, initial concentration and temperature using batch experiments. The results indicated that the biosorption process was relatively fast, and equilibrium was reached after about 30 min of contact. At pH 5, the nickel removal reached a maximum value. The kinetics and equilibrium data was best-fitted pseudo second-order and Langmuir isotherm indication monolayer chemisorption with maximum capacity 20.37 mg/g. The biosorption process was endothermic and spontaneous in nature. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis revealed that hydroxyl and carboxyl groups of tapioca peel were mainly responsible for the biosorption of nickel. The regeneration experiments showed that the biosorption capacity of tapioca peel was a total slight decreased 8.8% for five cycles. Tapioca peel in this work has high biosorption capacity that can be used as alternative biosorbent for treatment to remove nickel from wastewater in an efficient and economical way.   Key words: Biosorption, desorption, tapioca peel, regeneration, nickel removal.

Highlights

  • Water pollution by heavy metals is an important ecological and environmental issue in Thailand over the last two decades

  • The biosorption of nickel onto tapioca peel was found to be dependent on operating variables such as contact time, solution pH, metal concentration, and temperature

  • The kinetic studies revealed that the biosorption process followed the pseudo second-order, and Langmuir isotherm model was fitted well with the experimental data

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Summary

Introduction

Water pollution by heavy metals is an important ecological and environmental issue in Thailand over the last two decades. Nickel is one of the toxic pollutants and it can cause liver and kidney diseases, pulmonary fibrosis, skin dermatitis and chronic headaches. Industrial effluents from nickel electroplating, battery, mining and metallurgy of nickel, aircraft industries, pigments, and ceramic industries are the major sources of nickel contaminants in water resources (Reddy et al, 2011). The best available technologies for the removal of nickel from wastewater are ion exchange, chemical precipitation, reverse osmosis, and evaporation. All these methods have disadvantages like high capital and operation cost or not suitable for small-scale industries. Biosorption is one alternative that should be of concern to existing method, the advantages of this method over conventional treatment include high efficiency in metal removal from solutions, short operation time, possibility of metal recovery and low cost or free of biosorbent

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