Abstract
Wastewater problem is increasing lately due to uncontrollable disposals from industries and poor wastewater management. Wastewater discharged from industries contains dyes, heavy metal compounds, oil, etc and these contaminants will contaminant drinking water. Consuming water which is polluted by heavy metals such as copper, may result to human health problems, like anaemia, mental disorder, damages internally, nausea etc. The objective of this research is to study the effectiveness of copper, Cu (II) removal using organic adsorbent under the effect of varying pH and dosage of adsorbent. For this reason, watermelon rind was chosen as an organic adsorbent to remove Cu (II) from synthetic wastewater. Watermelon rind was chemically modified with hydrochloric acid to enhance the removal efficiency and the adsorption performance was compared with untreated organic adsorbent. It was found that the optimum pH for Cu (II) is 7. Adsorption equilibrium was described using Langmuir isotherm model and showed that the modified watermelon rind has a better loading capacity of metal ions compared to the unmodified watermelon rind. FTIR analysis shows that the peak shifts under carbonyl of unmodified watermelon rind differs from modified watermelon rind, due to the existing level of energy naturally in unmodified watermelon rind of copper to bind with carboxylic acid groups. The FESEM image study of modified watermelon rind shows that the structures are in irregular shapes and rough, tend to adsorb more due to higher porosity. Results show that the removal efficiency of modified watermelon rind was found to be higher (79.07%) as compared to raw watermelon rind (58.97%). It shows that acid modified watermelon rind has improved the removal efficiency of the adsorbent.
Keywords:
Adsorption, Organic Adsorbent, Watermelon Rind, Copper, Hydrochloric Acid, Wastewater