Physico‐Chemical Processes for Landfill Leachate Treatment: Experiments and Mathematical Models

Abstract

In this study, the adsorption of synthetic landfill leachate onto four kinds of activated carbon has been investigated. From the equilibrium and kinetics experiments, it was observed that coal based PAC presented the highest organic pollutants removal efficiency (54%), followed by coal based GAC (50%), wood based GAC (33%) and wood based PAC (14%). The adsorption equilibrium of PAC and GAC was successfully predicted by Henry‐Freundlich adsorption model whilst LDFA+Dual isotherm Kinetics model could describe well the batch adsorption kinetics. The flocculation and flocculation–adsorption experiments were also conducted. The results indicated that flocculation did not perform well on organics removal because of the dominance of low molecular weight organic compounds in synthetic landfill leachate. Consequently, flocculation as pretreatment to adsorption and a combination of flocculation–adsorption could not improve much the organic removal efficiency for the single adsorption process.

Keywords:

• Landfill leachate
• activated carbon adsorption
• adsorption modeling
• flocculation

Acknowledgments

This study was partial funded by the Institute of Water and Environment Resource Management (IWERM), University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). The authors are also grateful to Activated Carbon Technologies Pty Ltd., Australia for their support in providing the activated carbons.