Journal of Engineering Research and Reports

This study was aimed at developing chitosan-rice husk ash adsorbent for the removal of crude oil from contaminated water. Design Expert software 6.06 was used to design the adsorption experiment. The adsorption was tested for Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin isotherms and the kinetic studies also carried out. The effect of influencing parameters such as contact time, adsorbate concentration, adsorbent dosage and formulation ratio were studied. It was generally shown that adsorption process increased with time and adsorbate concentration and decreased with adsorbent dosage. Models for the prediction of adsorption capacity for the composite was significant with R² value of 0.8382 and P-value of 0.0017. Optimum conditions were found to be 0.90 wt/wt chitosan/silica ratio, contact time of 5 min, and oil/water ratio of 0.25 v/v, which gave 20.66 g/g sorption capacity respectively. Adsorption isotherm studies of Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin were carried out for the chitosan-rice husk ash composite. Temkin isotherm best fitted with R² value of 0.9999. The adsorption capacity of composite from isotherm studies was obtained to be 18.85 g/g adsorbent. The heat of adsorption b_T (kJmol^-1) obtained from Temkin isotherm study was -48.67 kJ/mol indicating physisorption of adsorbents to the crude oil.  Kinetic studies indicated that the pseudo-second order model suitably described the removal of crude oil by the composite with R² value 0.9999.