Abstract
Biomass immobilization in a polymeric matrix may improve biosorption capacity and facilitate
 the separation of biomass from metal-bearing solutions. Many polymers are studied as immobilizing agents for biosorption including biopolymers such as sodium alginate. In the article swelling behaviour of gel and dry beads has been studied in aqueous solutions with different acid-base character. Swelling of gel or dry calcium alginate beads was found in all acidic and basic solutions except of the gel beads in strong acidic solutions, which exhibited the tendency to shrink. Dry beads in diluted acidic solutions had the greatest stability because they exhibited minimum swelling. Dry and gel beads were completely dissolved in concentrated solutions of sodium and potassium hydroxides. The potential use of immobilized algal biomass in Ca-alginate beads for removal of copper ions from aqueous solution was also investigated. The results of the kinetic studies showed that the sorption of copper ions on gel immobilized beads are the most suitable.
Highlights
Heavy metal pollution is one of the most important environmental problems today
Obtained characteristics of the behaviour in acidic conditions are shown for gel beads (Table 1) and dry beads (Table 2-3)
The changes of the gel beads and dry beads in the basic solutions are listed in Table 4 - 6
Summary
Heavy metal pollution is one of the most important environmental problems today. One of the processes used for heavy metal removal from waste water and even their recovery can be biosorption that utilizes various natural materials of biologic origin (VOLESKY, 2003; KADUKOVÁ et al, 2008; WANG and CHEN, 2009).Biosorption can be defined as the passive sequestering of metal ions by metabolically inactive biomass via various physicochemical mechanisms. One of the processes used for heavy metal removal from waste water and even their recovery can be biosorption that utilizes various natural materials of biologic origin (VOLESKY, 2003; KADUKOVÁ et al, 2008; WANG and CHEN, 2009). For industrial application of biosorption, it is important to utilize an appropriate immobilization technique to prepare commercial biosorbents. Disadvantage of the free microbial cells used in laboratory conditions is that they are basically small particles, with low density, poor mechanical strength and little rigidity. In real application they may come up with the solid-liquid separation problems, possible biomass swelling, inability to regenerate/reuse and development of high pressure drop in the column mode. The polymeric matrix determines the mechanical strength and chemical resistance of the final biosorbent particle to be utilized for successive sorption-desorption cycles (WANG and CHEN, 2009)
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