Synergic adsorption performance of activated carbon prepared from Chinese prickly ash seeds

ABSTRACT

Waste residue of Chinese prickly ash seeds were simply treated with aqueous ZnCl₂ to prepared the high-performed activated carbon. It was characterized by the methods of XRD, SEM, EDX, FT-IR, BET and XPS. The synergetic adsorption performance of Chinese prickly ash seeds activated carbon for Pb²⁺, Ni²⁺ and Acid Orange IΙ (AO) was studied. In the single-component system, the adsorption capacity of Pb²⁺, Ni²⁺ and AO were 15.1, 10.7 and 188.4 mg/g, respectively. In the AO-Pb²⁺ system, the maximum adsorption capacity of Pb²⁺ and AO were 79.40 and 332.68 mg/g under temperature of 30°C and pH of 5.0, respectively. For AO-Ni²⁺ system, it was 375.6 and 38.3 mg/g, respectively. The adsorption kinetics was satisfactorily fitted by the pseudo-second-order model. The synergic adsorption process can be smoothly described by the non-modified Sips isotherm.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese prickly ash seeds
• activated carbon
• synergic adsorption
• adsorption thermodynamics
• adsorption kinetics

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the financial support by the Young Teacher Research Group Foundation of Northwest Normal University (NWNU-LKQN-18-21) and the National Science Foundation of China (No.21865031).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful for the financial support by the Young Teacher Research Group Foundation of Northwest Normal University (NWNU-LKQN-18-21) and the National Science Foundation of China (No.21865031).