Industrial Effluent Treatment by Multisolute Adsorption using Low Cost Adsorbents

Abstract

newline quotIndustrial wastewater is a serious threat and a menace to the environment as well as our existence. The very nature of the effluent is the signature of the fact that it is a complex process to bring down its hazardous nature and toxicity below the prescribed limits. In this research work adsorption is employed for the treatment of wastewater and two adsorbents are considered for the same, viz. conventional Activated Carbon and low cost Lignite. Another highlight of the present work is the change in the flow sheet of the wastewater treatment steps. Chemical oxygen demand was measured as a benchmark to compare the adsorption performance of the adsorbents. Two industries were selected for the research work, a vinyl sulphone dye plant and H-acid plant. For both the industries the adsorption was done on neutralized stream (conventional flow sheet ) and on raw acidic stream ( proposed flow sheet ). The results were highly in favour of the proposed flow sheet for both the industries, showing that adsorbents give much better results on raw acidic stream than the neutralized stream. Also lignite showed very close performance to activated carbon for one Industry and for another, it even out-performed activated carbon under the some set of adsorption conditions. Mathematical modeling of the adsorption process was also carried out using three different models. newline newlinequot newline