Adsorption of phenol using adsorbent derived from Saccharum officinarum biomass: optimization, isotherms, kinetics, and thermodynamic study

Upendra R Darla; Dilip H Lataye; Anuj Kumar; Bidhan Pandit; Mohd Ubaidullah

doi:10.1038/s41598-023-42461-y

Adsorption of phenol using adsorbent derived from Saccharum officinarum biomass: optimization, isotherms, kinetics, and thermodynamic study

Sci Rep. 2023 Oct 26;13(1):18356. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-42461-y.

Authors

Upendra R Darla¹, Dilip H Lataye², Anuj Kumar³, Bidhan Pandit⁴, Mohd Ubaidullah⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Civil Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, 440010, India.
² Department of Civil Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, 440010, India. dhlataye@civ.vnit.ac.in.
³ Department of Chemistry, GLA University, Mathura, 281406, India.
⁴ Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911, Leganés, Madrid, Spain.
⁵ Department of Chemistry, College of Science, King Saud University, P.O. Box 2455, 11451, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

The present research shows the application of Taguchi's design of experiment approach to optimize the process parameters for the removal of phenol onto surface of Saccharum officinarum biomass activated carbon (SBAC) from an aqueous solution to maximize adsorption capacity of SBAC. The effect of adsorption parameters viz. adsorbent dose (m), temperature (T), initial concentration (C₀) and mixing time (t) on response characteristics i.e., adsorption capacity (q_t) has been studied at three levels by using L₉ orthogonal array (OA) which further analyzed by variance analysis (ANOVA) for adsorption data and signal/noise (S/N) ratio data by using 'larger the better' characteristics. Using ANOVA, the optimum parameters are found to be m = 2 g/L, C₀ = 150 mg/L, T = 313 K and t = 90 min, resulting in a maximum adsorption capacity of 64.59 mg/g. Adopting ANOVA, the percentage contribution of each process parameter in descending order of sequence is adsorbent dose 59.97% > initial phenol concentration 31.70% > contact time 4.28% > temperature 4.04%. The phenol adsorption onto SBAC was best fitted with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model and follows the Radke-Prausnitz isotherm model. Thermodynamic parameters suggested a spontaneous, exothermic nature and the adsorption process approaches physisorption followed by chemisorption. Hence the application of Taguchi orthogonal array design is a cost-effective and time-efficient approach for carrying out experiments and optimizing procedures for adsorption of phenol and improve the adsorption capacity of SBAC.