WasteWater Treatment via Adsorptive Removal of Antibiotics with Synthesized Carbon-based Adsorbent

Because of the partial metabolism of antibiotics in human’s body and the release of the effluent drug products, antibiotics have been noticed frequently from our environment. The presence of antibiotics in environment causes to growing antibiotics resistant bacteria and harmful effects on water value. Wastewater treatment generally involves many methods. Adsorptive removal is one of the most important and low-cost methods. Concerning the removal of antibiotics from wastewater, conventional treatment processes such as biological degradation and adsorption on wastewater have been demonstrated to be an effective method. Large surface area, micro-porous nature, high adsorption capacity, high purity and easy availability cause the treatment of sewage sludge with carbon-based materials is deliberated to be an effective method for the removal of antibiotics from wastewater. The nanosized behavior of the carbon nanotubes makes them more effective to use as an adsorbent in antibiotics from waste water solution. The scientist indicated that CNTs could be used as adsorbents in a wide pH range of 3–10 in qualitative agreement with experimental results. In this paper we synthesized the carbon nanotubes from natural gas via chemical vapor deposition method. The range of the carbon nanotubes size is in 10-35 nm. The surface area of the synthesized CNTs is calculated by BET method and it is about 870 cm2/g. The adsorption capacity of the CNTs is 341 g/g. The adsorption process parameters in antibiotics removal process such as: temperature, time, mass loaded and initial concentrations are optimized. The adsorption kinetic modeling reveals that the pseudo second order is fitted the data. The adsorption isotherm model is Langmuir which appropriate the properties of the carbon-based adsorbents.

Keywords:

Antibiotics , Resistant , Adsorption , CNT.