Carbon black is one of the most popular pollutants that is obtained from waste tires which are considered to be a real threat to the environment, but at the same time it could be a good alternative of activated carbon due to its low cost, effectiveness and its existence all time unlike activated carbon that has high cost and side effect resulting from activation process.
In our project, feasibility of using PCB for the removal of the reactive dyes from textile wastewater and methylene blue (MB) from the synthetic solution was investigated to protect the environment and save money by applying the carbon black to serve the field of water treatment.
The effects of different experimental parameters on dye removal were investigated for enhancing the treatment efficiency. This including pH effect which is considered to be one of the most important factors that affects adsorption process due to its impact on surface binding-sites of the adsorbent and the ionization process of the dye molecule. Kinetics adsorption which study the amount of MB adsorbed onto pyrolysed carbon black as a function of contact time. Adsorption isotherm which gave us an indication about the distribution of adsorbent molecules between the liquid and solid phases when the adsorption process reached equilibrium state, our isotherm study was based on different particle sizes and different temperatures, and PBC particles size which are (0.15, 0.3, 0.6) mm.
Results showed that dye adsorptive removal was very rapid, and equilibrium for real textile waste water and methylene blue was achieved in less than 20min, so the kinetics of MB and dye in real textile waste water adsorption onto PCB wasn’t followed the pseudo-first or second-order models. The adsorption equilibrium data fit very well to the Fruendlich adsorption isotherm model according to the correlation coefficient R2which are (0.95, 0.970, 0.98, 0.958) at different particle sizes (0.15, 0.3, 0.6)mm and different temperatures(308, 325)K that showing a heterogeneous coverage of dye molecules at the outer surface of BCP, usually temperatures is supposed to be not effective even if it affects adsorption process, it should be inversely proportional as the temperature increased the surface area of the carbons decreased according to results we had the opposite occurred as temperature increased the adsorption rate increased and the only explanation for this case is something as a steam generation resulting from heating that made an activation to the carbon which is supposed to be porous but because of existing polymers as fuel that resulted from pyrolyses process which blocked the pores and by heating these polymers are released from pores and left them empty, even the differences in particle sizes(0.15, 0.3, 0.6 mm) didn’t affect the result as data clarified where it should be small particle size have a high surface area. So the adsorption process occurred on the surface of carbon as we mentioned previously. The adsorption process reaches the max at acidic region where the pH =2 this suggests that a reaction could happen during the change in range of solution PH which causes change in absorbance of solution due to electrostatic attraction force between dye molecules because it usually reach the equilibrium state at pH approximately equal 8.
We recommended in our project to have a wonderful results in future to apply a steam generation on the PCB that was prepared to remove the polymers from pores to be more effective in adsorption, running the experiment in continues flow mode and apply the PCB on other types of real textile waste water.