Abstract
Water pollution caused by heavy metals poses a serious threat to the ecosystem and human health. Among the various treatment techniques for water remediation, adsorption is an efficient method due to its high capacity, low cost, and simplicity. Thallium (Tl) is highly toxic to mammals and its removal from water is gaining increasingly prominent attention. In this study, three fungal strains (Fusarium sp. FP, Arthrinium sp. FB, and Phoma sp. FR) were tested for removal of Tl (I) from aqueous solutions and showed excellent removal performance. The prepared inactive fungal strains were characterized by XRD, FT-IR, SEM, and XPS analyses. The effects of pH, contact time, biomass dosage, and reaction temperature on the removal efficiency of Tl (I) were systematically investigated. The results indicated that the adsorption isotherm data fit well with the Langmuir model, and the pseudo-second-order model was more consistent with the kinetic data description. The maximum adsorption capacity of the fungal strain (Fusarium sp. FP, Arthrinium sp. FB, and Phoma sp. FR) for Tl (I) was found to be 94.69mg/g, 66.97mg/g, and 52.98mg/g, respectively. The thermodynamic data showed that the sorption process was spontaneous and endothermic. The present study showed that the inactive fungal strains could be a promising adsorbent material for Tl (I) removal.
Highlights
Phoma sp. (Figure 1), Based on which is named as Fusarium sp
To the knowledge of existing documentation, the three isolated strains have been demonstrated as a highefficiency approach for the removal of heavy metals, Cd (II), Pb (II) an so on (Anagnostopoulos et al 2012 ), and may be conceivable for the biosorption of other metals such as Tl(I)
The results show that removal of l % of Tl(I) ions decreased with increasing adsorbent dosage
Summary
Fresh water is no longer available due to unwanted toxic chemicals such as heavy metals (Dimpe &Nomngongo 2017). Among the various heavy metals, thallium (Tl) is more toxic to the ecosystem and human health than conventional heavy metals such as Cd, Cu, Hg, and Pb (Li et al 2017, Peter &Viraraghavan 2005), and causes significantly adverse health effects even at a low level. Tl(I) is highly stable and mobile and dominant in water (Birungi &Chirwa 2015). While Tl(III) is highly reactive and can be hydrolyzed in alkaline or neutral solutions. Long-term Tl poisoning can cause anorexia, headache, abdomen pains, alopecia, blindness and even death (Galván-Arzate &Santamarıa 1998). To minimize these health risks, a maximum contaminant level of 2 μg/L was set as drinking water standard by the US
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