Biosorption parameters: carob kibbles (Ceratonia Siliqua) as a potential biosorbent for boron removal from aqueous solutions

• Autor(a) principal: Diaz Cano, Luz Adriana
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/12151
• topic: Bioadsorption; Boron; Carob kibbles; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

This work aimed to investigate the removal of boron by bioadsorption using carob kibbles (Ceratonia siliqua L.) biomass, a by-product of a seed flour factory located in Faro, Portugal. Batch experiments were carried out to evaluate the effect of several parameters such as contact time, pH of the solution, initial boron concentration, adsorbant dosage, temperature of the solution and particle size on boron removal. The optimum contact time obtained was 300 min and the bioremoval is favored as the solution pH increases. This removal was found to increase with an increase in the adsorbent dosage. With an initial boron concentration of 100 mg/L, the maximum percentage of removal (67 %) was achieved with the highest adsorbent dosage tested (200 g/L). On the other hand, when using a fixed dosage of biosorbent (50 g/L) the percentage of boron removal decreases as the initial boron concentration was raised from 20 to 200 mg/L. The best removal temperature was 25 ºC and the particle size that binded more boron from the aqueous solution was 0.025 mm. Particle size distribution showed that the majority of biomass is within the sizes between 0.025 and 0.106 mm.