Enhancement of the Stability of Biosorbents for Metal-Ion
Adsorption
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Abstract
Biosorbents have demonstrated great
potential in the treatment
of metal-containing wastewater. However, one of the bottleneck issues
of using biosorbents is that amounts of organic carbon release from
biosorbents into water. This seriously limits the application of biosorption
technology in treating wastewater. In this work, a novel methodology
was developed to greatly reduce the organic carbon release and enhance
the stability of biosorbents by using barley straw as the model biosorbent
material and nickel as the model metal ion. The raw barley straw was
first made into cylindrical pellets, which were coated with a sodium
alginate (SA) and poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) membrane. The coating
conditions including the ratio of SA to PVA, glutaraldehyde (GA) dose,
concentration of CaCl<sub>2</sub> solution, and cross-linking time
were optimized by L<sub>9</sub>(3<sup>4</sup>) orthogonal array design.
The pellets coated at the optimal conditions (1:1 mass ratio of SA
to PVA, 1.0 mL of GA, 8% CaCl<sub>2</sub>, and 20 min of cross-linking
time) were then applied for nickel adsorption. The effects of the
solution pH and ionic strength on the adsorption equilibrium and desorption
of adsorbed nickel ions were investigated. Scanning electron microscopy
and synchrotron X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy were used to locate
the adsorption sites on the coated pellets. The results demonstrated
that organic carbon release of the coated pellets was significantly
reduced to 3.8–9.7 mg/g of dry barley straw pellets in the
nickel adsorption process, while that of the raw barley straw particles
was 44 mg/g. The nickel uptake increased to 25.6 mg/g, higher than
that of the raw barley straw particles