Avaliação da remoção de Al3+ em meio aquoso por adsorção em casca de arroz in natura e cascas modificadas quimicamente

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the most serious problems related to environmental pollution is the contamination of water, mainly, through improper discard of industrial and agricultural waste. Thus, the main objective of the present study is to evaluate the removal of Al3+ in aqueous environment by adsorption on raw rice husk and chemically modified rice husks. For this purpose experiments were performed on a laboratory scale batch and was seen that actually occur a removing of aluminum concentration when it is in contact with the biosorbent until to be achieved an balance adsorption time. Three types of biosorbents were used: raw rice husk (R-RH), and chemically modified rice husk with an acid (CM-RHA) and basic solution (CM-RHB) in order to evaluate which one has the best adsorption of soluble aluminum. Three statistical 33 Box-Behnken experiment designs were performed to optimize the conditions in order to find the best answer for aluminum adsorption in batch system. The optimum conditions found for CM-RHB, which had better metal adsorption response, with a recovery about 97.60% were: (X1) mass 0.1500 g; (X2) volume 7.5 mL and (X3) contact time between the aluminum solution and biosorbent which is about 5 hours. During the execution of factorial experiment design 33 Box-Behnken was kept in common, the value of pH (pH ~ 5) and the concentration of Al3+ 30,0 mg L-1. The flame atomic absorption spectrometric (F AAS), was used to quantify the metal in solution after its adsorption. Found the optimal conditions, were carried on other studies, such as the study of effect pH where was considered the range of 4,0 to 6,0 as well the study of adsorption isotherms adopting the models of Langmuir and Freundlich. The best pH for adsorption of Al3+ was 5,0 and above this value there are losses by precipitation in form of hydroxide. These losses should be taken into account during the calculations after its adsorption. The Langmuir model was the one which showed high determination coefficient values (R2) and relatively close to 1, thereby presenting the best fit of the linearized isotherms compared to Freundlich model which showed lower determination coefficient values. Thus the biosorbent used in this work was efficient in aluminum removal, either in CM-RHB form and R-RH form rather than CM-RHA form that always showed low adsorption capacity of Al3+ under the conditions established and considered optimum in this work.