Kinetic study of a cationic dye adsorption by dewatered alum sludge

Abstract

The controlling mechanism of an adsorption process can be assisted by kinetic analysis. The objective of this study was to develop a dye adsorption kinetics model. Remazol blue R dye was used to prepare synthetic textile wastewater. Reusing dewatered alum sludge as the adsorption material to remove dye from synthetic textile wastewater was evaluated in this study. Kinetics study of the dye adsorption was performed by fitting the experimental data into Elovich, pseudo-second order type I, II and intra-particle diffusion kinetic models. The results showed that the adsorption kinetic dye was best described by a pseudo-second order type I kinetic model with R² of 0·994. The kinetics evaluation indicated that dewatered alum sludge is a good dye adsorption material.

Keywords:

• Adsorption
• Cationic dye
• Dewatered alum sludge
• Kinetics models
• Pseudo-second order

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the Faculty of Engineering and Centre for Defence Foundation Studies, Universiti Pertahanan Nasional Malaysia for providing research facilities.