Removal of Rhodamine B from water by cedar cone: Effect of calcinations and chemical activation

The aim of this work is to obtain optimal preparation conditions of cedar cone (CC) using calcinations and the chemical activation. For the calcinations treatment, the temperature was varied from 300 to 600 °C at different calcinations durations (30 min–5.00 h 30 min), while the chemical activation was carried on using bases and acids reagents such as: H3PO4, H2SO4, HNO3 for the acid reagents and NaOH, Na2SO4, Na2CO3 for bases ones successively, at the same concentration of 0.1 mol/L. Furthermore other chemical activation parameters were tested such as acids concentration and impregnation ratio. The efficiency of the treated cedar cone was tested by basic dye Rhodamine B (RhB) sorption from aqueous solutions in a batch system. The results show that the maximum dye removal was obtained for the case of calcined cedar cone at a temperature of 500 °C with a 4 h30 min time duration and for the case of HNO3 activated cedar cone at a concentration of 2 mol/L with an impregnation ratio of 20. netic data were fitted to pseudo-first-order, pseudo-second-order, intra-particulate diffusion and Boyd models. The sorption kineticsʹ was found to follow the pseudo-second-order model.