Studies on adsorption of phenol from wastewater by agricultural waste

In this paper, preliminary investigation of various agricultural wastes-Rice mill residue (RM), Wheat mill reside (WM), Dall mill residue (DM) and the Banana peels (BM) was carried out to study their ability to be used as adsorbents for phenol-removal from wastewater. This study reports the feasibility of employing dal mill residue waste (DM) as an adsorbent for removing phenol from wastewater. The performance of DM was compared with the commercially available activated carbon (CAC). Batch mode experiments were conducted with activated DM to study the effects of initial concentration of phenol, pH and the temperature of aqueous solution on adsorption. Equilibrium adsorption isotherms and kinetics were investigated. The experimental data were analyzed by the Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin models and the isotherm data fitted well to the Freundlich isotherm with monolayer adsorption capacity of 6.189 mg/g. The kinetic data obtained at different concentrations were analyzed using a pseudo-first order and pseudo-second- order equation. The experimental data fitted very well with the pseudo-first-order kinetic model. The FTIR analysis revealed that carboxyl and hydroxyl functional groups were mainly responsible for the sorption of phenol. Finally, the DM was found to be a promising adsorbent for phenol adsorption as compared to activated carbon.