Abstract
Background: Reactive dyes have been a great concern for protecting the aquatic flora and fauna and biodiversity of environment because many of these dyes and their breakdown products have been found toxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic effects on ecosystem.
Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the use of clam shell powder as a low cost adsorbent for the removal of C.I Reactive Blue 21 (RB-21), anionic dye from an aqueous solution.
Method: Different treatment methods are investigated but amongst them adsorption have found to be most cost effective and efficient method. The effects of pH, dye concentration, speed of agitation, adsorbent loading were studied using batch mode adsorptive removal. The adsorbent was characterised by BET analyser and FTIR spectroscopy.
Results: Results showed that the adsorption of the dye was favourable at acidic condition. The kinetics of adsorption was studied using pseudo first order and pseudo second order kinetics models. The collected results confirmed that the pseudo second order kinetics model exhibited the best fit with the experimental data.
Conclusion: This study has demonstrated that the low cost clamshell powder can be employed as effective and inexpensive adsorbent for the removal of RB-21 from aqueous solutions.
Keywords: Adsorption, biodiversity, C.I reactive blue 21, clam shell biomass, effluent treatment, spectroscopy.
Graphical Abstract
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