Charcoal Prepared from <i>Bougainvillea spectabilis</i> Leaves as Low Cost Adsorbent: Kinetic and Equilibrium Studies for Removal of Iron from Aqueous Solution

Abstract

Abstract Biosorption is one of the effective technique for removal of metals from aqueous solutions/industrial effluents. Present work is aimed to use low cost and ecofriendly material to remove the iron metal from aqueous solution which could possibly be used at industrial level. For this purpose, Bougainvillea spectabilis leaves were used for the production of charcoal. This charcoal was activated using HCl and HNO 3 . The AC shows promising efficiency for the adsorption of Fe II as a function of medium pH, contact time, adsorbent dose and temperature. Maximum adsorption was observed with 0.5–0.9 g adsorbent dose, 30 min contact time and at pH 3. Adsorption showed independence of temperature in the range of 30–70 °C. Among, Freundlich and Langmuir isotherms, the adsorbate followed Langmuir isothermal model. Among kinetics models, adsorbate followed pseudo second order kinetic model with R 2 values of 0.9985 and 0.9996 for HCl treated and HNO 3 treated AC, respectively. These data suggest that AC synthesized from Bougainvillea leaves proved to be an excellent adsorbent for the removal of iron metal from aqueous solution.