Adsorption of ciprofloxacin from aqueous solution using surface improved tamarind shell as an economical and effective adsorbent

Antibiotics in water bodies are emerging as an alarming new pollutant because of its persistent and recombinant nature. In recent period of human lifestyle, pharmaceutical products play a vital role in many perspectives. Due to this unpredictable usage of products, the unreacted components release into waterbodies in trace quantities. Eventhough these trace quantities initiate a crisis of developing resistant antibacterial strains which pose health risks to humans and animals. This work reports the batch adsorption of a fluoroquinolone, a fourth-generation antibiotic compound by a biosorbent made by acid-treated tamarind shells. The shells were treated with zinc chloride and hydrochloric acid. The characterization of biosorbent was performed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and field emission scanning electron microscopy. The optimized adsorption parameters of time, pH and temperature were 30 minutes, 6 and 60 °C. The adsorbent can be reused up to seven times with negligible loss in its adsorption capacity. Adsorption followed by Langmuir, Freundlich and Tempkin model where used to determine the correlation coefficient. Pseudo first-order, second-order and intra-particle kinetic model were used to fit the experimental data. The results are best described by pseudo second-order denoting chemisorption and Freundlich isotherm model describing multilayer adsorption.Novelty StatementThe proposed work is to investigate about improved tamarind shell as biomass used in the removal unreacted PPCP components that have been released into aquatic environment.The novelty of this paper lies in that it puts forward a better resource utilization method for treating PPCP component wastewater, and studies the method theoretically from the perspective of mechanism and proves its feasibility.Identifying the maximum adsorption of antibiotic component from wastewater under different conditions and finding the optimum range.In addition to the existing literatures, this study has compared the adsorption efficiency of raw and treated adsorbent material prepared using Tamarind shell.