Research PaperFunctionalized MgAl-layered hydroxide intercalated date-palm biochar for Enhanced Uptake of Cationic dye: Kinetics, isotherm and thermodynamic studies
Graphical abstract
Introduction
The presence of toxic organic dyes at high concentration levels in the wastewater streams arising from their widespread demand and utilization in textile, cosmetic, paper, leather, food, and medical industries poses serious threats to the environmental health (Mu'azu et al., 2018b). Methylene blue (MB) is a popularly used toxic dye that is highly stable to light and oxidation and thus difficult to degrade. A high concentration of MB (>7.0 mg/kg) may result in severe effects on human health, such as the increase in blood pressure, nausea, psychological problem, and intestinal pain (Zhu et al., 2018). Subsequently, the development of an efficient purification method for dye-bearing wastewater is of great environmentally important. Amongst various purification techniques, the adsorption has been considered as one of the most effective purification methods due to its simple and low-cost operation, fast removal rate, and higher removal performance compared to other treatment techniques (Zubair et al., 2018a).
During the last two decades, various materials such as carbon nanotube (Rodrigues et al., 2019), graphene oxide (Yang et al., 2019), bentonite (Babu and Antony, 2019), activated carbon (Tong et al., 2018) and magnetic materials (Palza et al., 2019) have been investigated for MB removal from waste streams. However, most of these adsorbent materials exhibit some disadvantages, including high cost, high dosage, long contact time, and limited reusability despite their good sorption performances. Therefore, the scientific domain has focused on designing and developing eco-friendly and sustainable materials exhibiting effective and fast removal of MB and other dyes from wastewaters. Biochars, circular economy-based carbonaceous materials (Lin et al., 2018), have increasingly been explored as adsorbent materials, owing to their several distinctive characteristics such as high microporosity and surface area, abundant oxygen functionalities, and excellent exchange capacity for ions (Park et al., 2019). These unique properties validate biochars as extremely promising, low cost, eco-friendly, and sustainable materials for effective purification of organic or inorganic contaminated wastewater streams (Ahmed et al., 2016).
Date palms are one of the major cultivated trees globally, with more than 300 different species and tens of million tonnes of annual production. This generates an enormous capacity of date palm wastes consisting of fronds, leaves, and trunks (Al-Kutti et al., 2017). Therefore, eco-friendly utilization of this wastes into beneficial products is one of the key points of sustainable development. Recently, a composite of date palm ash with layered double hydroxide (LDH) resulted in an eco-economical and sustainable adsorbent for the removal of anionic dyes (Blaisi et al., 2018). Usman et al. reported the influence of temperature during pyrolysis on the composition and morphology of biochar (Usman et al., 2015).
Recently, biochar-LDH based composites open a new window of research for higher and fast removal rates of various pollutants. For instance, Zhang et al. reported an improved adsorption capacity (410 mg/g) of phosphate ion from water using MgAl co-precipitated onto the biochar matrix (Zhang et al., 2013). Wang et al. reported an efficient removal of arsenic with excellent reusability of biochar-NiMn-LDH compared to NiMn-LDH (Wang et al., 2016). Tan et al. produced decorated MgAl- ramie stem (Boehmeria nivea L.) via simple pyrolysis and reported as an excellent sorption agent for crystal violet dye (Tan et al., 2016a). Similarly, Li et al. demonstrated the molar ratio of MgAl on the biochar matrix as a vital factor affecting phosphate adsorption performance (Li et al., 2016). Meili et al. evaluated the sorption performance of MB on the different molar ratios of MgAl (2:1, 3:1, and 4:1) on bone-biochar. The author reported that biochar-MgAl with molar ratio 2:1 and 3:1 exhibited a greater affinity for MB compared to MgAl and biochar alone (Meili et al., 2019). Previous studies demonstrated that the coupling of biochar with LDH is a favorable approach to produce high performance, sustainable, and eco-economical adsorbent materials. Thus, hybridization of LDH with biochars produced from date palm waste has a potential to produce versatile adsorbents with inherent and exceptional ion exchange ability, high specific surface area, and less toxicity for organic contaminated wastewater treatment. However, research gap along this area involves understanding the influence of biochar/MgAl mass ratios on adsorptive performance and uptake mechanism of dyes removal from water.
The objective of this study is to functionalize biochar with MgAl LDH composites at different biochar content (1–10 g) via a co-precipitation technique. The effect of biochar amount on the final characteristics of biochar-MgAl composites and the sorption performance and mechanism of MB dye were evaluated. The surface functionalities, structure, surface characteristics, and morphology of the produced B-MgAl were examined using various characterization techniques, including FTIR, XRD, BET, SEM, and TEM, respectively. The effect of adsorption parameters and mechanism of MB dye adsorption onto biochar-MgAl composite were evaluated using isotherm, kinetics, thermodynamic studies, and characterizations of the spent biochar-MgAl composite.
Section snippets
Materials
The fronds of date-palm collected from Al-Hasa city, KSA was utilized to produce the biochar used in this study. 4-hour slow pyrolysis was employed at a 3 °C/min heating rate until a maximum of 700 °C. sigma Aldrich Co. (USA) Mg(NO3)2.6H2O and Al(NO3)3.9H2O of high purity salts were used as purchased. A prepared 1000 mg/L stock solution of MB dye was used for preparing required lower MB concentrations using deionized water via serial dilutions.
Production of B-MgAl -LDH
The B-MgAl LDH composites were produced at
Surface and structure analyses
Fig. 1a depicts the FTIR images of biochar-MgAl LDH composites. The spectrums consist of all characteristic bands of biochar and MgAl with a slight difference in peak intensities. The wide peak observed at 3453 cm−1 is characteristic stretching vibrations of hydroxyl groups (-OH) (Mu'azu et al., 2018a). The sharp peak located at 1370 cm−1 in B-MgAl-1 and B-MgAl-2 composites is linked to the nitrate ions (NO3−) from MgAl-LDH (Blaisi et al., 2018). This indicates the excellent intercalation of
Conclusion
This study reports the fabrication of biochar/MgAl LDH composites at varying biochar content. The effect of biochar additions on LDH composite and its sorption performance of MB was investigated. Characterization results clearly demonstrated that the incorporation of biochar (1–5 g) significantly improved the characteristics (oxygen functionalities and surface area) with excellent dispersion and crystallinity. However, higher biochar dosage resulted in poor crystallinity associated with the
Author contribution
Mukarram Zubair conceived the idea, contributed in data analysis and writing and revision the article, Muhammad Saood Manzar performed the experiments, Nuhu D Mu'azu contributed in writing and reviewing, Ismail Anil supported in TEM and XRD characterization and writing and revision, Nawaf I. Blaisi reviewed the article, Mamdouh Al-Harthi supported in synthesis and characterization of composites.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
Acknowledgment
This research work was financially supported under King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) NSTIP Project No. 12-Env2229-46 through Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia.
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2022, Environmental Technology and InnovationCitation Excerpt :From Fig. 1, it is clear that the tetracycline adsorption capacity on BGC was 9.82 mg/g. And the tetracycline adsorption capacity on ZnAl-LDH/BGC increased from 9.21 mg/g to 14.95 mg/g as the Zn:Al molar ratio increased from 2:1 to 3:1. The presence of LDHs on the biochar surface has improved the adsorption capacity of the adsorbent (Moreno-Pérez et al., 2021; Zubair et al., 2020). However, at a Zn:Al molar ratio of 4:1, the tetracycline adsorption capacity on ZnAl-LDH/BGC decreased to 12.64 mg/g.