Author(s)

Nour T. Abdel-Ghani¹, Ghadir A. El-Chaghaby^2*, Enas Mohamed Zahran³

¹Chemistry Department, Faculty of science, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt.
²RCFF, Agricultural Research Center, Giza, Egypt.
³Holding Company for Water and Wastewater, Greater Cairo Water Company, Cairo, Egypt.

The adsorption of aluminium(III) and iron(III) ions from their single and binary systems, by RHAC was investigated in a batch system. The activated carbon prepared from rice hulls was characterized by scanning electron microscopy and Fourier transformation infrared techniques. Batch adsorption experiments were performed under different operating conditions including pH (2 - 5), adsorbent dosage (0.5 - 2.0 g/l), initial ion concentration (5 - 100 mg/l), and contact time (30 - 240 min). The equilibrium time for maximum ions removal was found to be 180 min in single and binary ions systems. The kinetics of adsorption was evaluated using the pseudo-first order, pseudo-second order and Elovich kinetic models. The Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin equilibrium models were applied to the adsorption experimental data. Real wastewater samples were collected from different locations to investigate the efficiency of rice hull activated carbon in treating real samples. The real wastewater samples were treated with the activated carbon prepared from rice hulls and a commercial activated carbon. The results showed that the activated carbon prepared in the present work was more efficient in the removal of aluminium and iron from real wastewater as compared to the commercial activated carbon which is more advantageous considering both economics and environmental parameters.

Aluminium, Iron, Adsorption, Rice Hulls, Activated Carbon, Kinetics, Equilibrium

Abdel-Ghani, N. , El-Chaghaby, G. and Zahran, E. (2015) Cost Effective Adsorption of Aluminium and Iron from Synthetic and Real Wastewater by Rice Hull Activated Carbon (RHAC). American Journal of Analytical Chemistry, 6, 71-83. doi: 10.4236/ajac.2015.61007.