Wastewater Treatment by New High-Performance Activated Carbon from Semecarpus Anacardium and Quercus Infectoria Nutshells: Applications- Kinetic and Equilibrium Studies

This study utilized Semecarpus Anacardium (SA) and Quercus Infectoria (QI) nutshells as raw materials to manufacture Activated Carbon (AC) which is both inexpensive and possesses a large surface area. All materials were examined using Fourier Transform InfraRed (FT-IR) spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM/EDX), X-Ray powder Diffraction (XRD), and Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller (BET) surface area methods. The effective synthesis of AC was validated by surface functional groups in FT-IR spectra and XRD diffractograms, which showed a broad peak in the region of 2θ=15-28° and a faint and wide peak in the range of 2θ=40-48°. The BET results indicated that the AC synthesized from SA and activated with KOH (ACSAK) had the greatest surface area (717 m2/g), the most enormous pore volume (0.286 cm3/g), and mean pore diameters ( 2nm). The synthesized AC in this research can be classified into micro-pore adsorbents entirely. Finally, the resulting ACSAK was applied to Methylene Blue (MB) adsorption. Adsorption studies demonstrate that the Langmuir isotherm (R2=0.996) matches somewhat more accurately than the Freundlich and Temkin isotherms. Our adsorption kinetics findings show that the pseudo-second-order model has the maximum fitness and accuracy on MB adsorption data in AC (R2 = 0.999).