Comparison between traditional and low cost material to remove residues of Methylene Blue dye from aqueous solutions

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Central Laboratory for Aquaculture Research, Agricultural Research Center

2 Limonolgy

Abstract

Dyes considered harmful pollutants which represent a serious threat to the aquatic environment, which require expensive materials to get rid of, which consequently producing a critical situation that requires the availability of all efforts to solve, especially in conditions of water scarcity expected in the near future. Hence, the urgent need, to use cheap and eco-friendly adsorbents instead of traditional materials to purify and reuse water several times, becomes one of the most important motives for conducting this research. This experiment was conducted, to compare the effect of using low cost adsorbent material against a traditional one with various dosages and various contacting periods at an ambient conditions of pH and temperature that are suitable for aquatic animals to remove Methylene Blue (MB) dye residues from water. The highest removal efficiency percentages of 0.1 g chitosan and silica gel toward 100 mg/l of MB dye, was 93.1 % and 86.9 %, respectively, after 60 minutes of contacting period. The equilibrium adsorption behavior data was fitted well to Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption isotherm models. Based on the achieved results, we recommend the use of chitosan in purifying the aquatic environment from some organic pollutants such as dyes, which are widely used in many industries, because of the advantages of chitosan, which are low cost, wide availability and completely safe for the environment.

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