ABSTRACT
Melanoidins are dark brown recalcitrant pollutants found in the molasses-based distillery effluents. In this study, graphene oxide nanosheets (GONs) were successfully synthesized to remove melanoidin for the first time. Characterization techniques, such as SEM, TEM, XRD, FT-IR, Raman, TGA, AFM and XPS were used to investigate the adsorbent properties. The highest adsorption capacity for real industrial and synthetic melanoidin solutions at optimum conditions were 18.31 and 18.02 g g−1, respectively. The adsorption data were revealed to fit well in pseudo-second-order kinetics and Langmuir isotherm models. Findings from this study suggested that the GONs could be highly effective for melanoidin removal from molasses wastewater.
Acknowledgements
This research did not receive any specific funding.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.