Comparative Investigation of the removal of oil from contaminated wastewater using thermo-chemically modified lignocellulosic biomass

The volume of oil-contaminated wastewater generated from petrochemical industries and various oil fields is increasing rapidly. The discharge of such oily wastewater endangers terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems due to the high organic load and toxicity of the oily components. Currently, there are several technologies available for the treatment of oily wastewater among which adsorption was observed to be a promising technique for the removal of oil emulsions from wastewater. In this study, adsorption of oily wastewater was investigated using different types of adsorbents namely, modified acid pyrolyzed date seed (APD) and base pyrolyzed date seed (BPD) based adsorbents. The effects of pH, oil dose, temperature, and contact time were investigated for all the adsorbents. The results of the study showed that the percentage of oil removal increased with increasing contact time. It was observed that base modified activated date seed resulted in ۸۳% removal of oil. Both APD and BPD showed a high percentage removal of ۹۲.۹ % and ۹۴.۳ % respectively at a lower acidic pH of ۲. The adsorption of oily wastewater onto both APD and BPD is consistent with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The Langmuir isotherm is more accurate to represent sorption by APD whereas Freundlich isotherms were found to better fit the adsorption equilibrium data for BPD.

Keywords:

Pyrolyzed date seeds , chemically modified activated date seeds , thermo-chemically modified lignocellulosic biomass , kinetics , equilibrium isotherms