(93d) Utilization of Aegle Marmelos Correa Fruit Shell as a Novel Sorbent for Methylene Blue Adsorption

The contamination of aqueous system such as lake and rivers by textile industrial effluent is a major environmental issue in our modern world due its high effluent concentration of dye stuffs. This investigation presents result pertaining to the adsorptive removal and potential feasibility of Aegle marmelos correa fruit shell (AS) as low cost adsorbent for the removal of water soluble Methylene Blue dye from aqueous solution. The activated carbon prepared from the abundantly available waste material of Aegle marmelos correa fruit shell using the phosphoric acid activation followed by thermal activation at 600ºC was used in this work. The batch mode experiments were conducted to study the effects of initial solution pH, initial dye concentration, adsorbent contact time with dye solution,adsorbent dosage and the solution operating temperature were investigated. The maximum dye removal percentage occurred at alkaline solution pH. When the temperature increased from 30ºC to 50ºC the percentage removal also increased subsequently. With increased initial dye concentration the percentage adsorption decreased whereas the adsorption capacity of the adsorbent found to increase. When adsorbent dosage increased percentage adsorption of dye increased but the adsorption capacity per unit mass of the adsorbent decreased.The isotherm model fittings such as Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms were tested with the experimental data using the coefficients of correlation.The results obtained from the batch mode experiments reveals that the AS activated carbon is an alterative and attractive adsorbent for removing organic water soluble Methylene Blue dye which shows greater removal of colour from aqueous solution.

Keywords: Adsorption; Aegle marmelos correa; Methylene blue removal; Low cost adsorbent; Water soluble dye.