Corncob as an effective, eco-friendly, and economic biosorbent for removing the azo dye Direct Yellow 27 from aqueous solutions

Abstract

The corncob is an agricultural waste generated in huge quantities during corn processing. In this paper, we tested the capacity of corncob particles for water purification by removing the azo dye Direct Yellow 27 (DY27) via biosorption. The biosorption process was investigated in terms of the kinetics, equilibria, and thermodynamics. Batch biosorption studies showed that the biosorption performance has strong inverse correlations to the solution pH and the corncob particle size, and it increases quickly with increasing contact time and initial dye concentration. The pseudo-second-order kinetic model provides the best fit to the experimental data, whereas the Redlich-Peterson isotherm model is most suitable for describing the observed equilibrium biosorption. The biosorption process is exothermic, spontaneous, and physisorption in character. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and confocal scanning laser microscopy (CSLM) studies suggest that lignocellulose and proteins play key roles in the biosorption of DY27 from aqueous solutions by corncob. Furthermore, after biosorption onto the corncob, the dye can be effectively desorbed using 0.1 M NaOH solution. Therefore, the corncob can be used as a promising biosorbent to remediate DY27-contaminated water and wastewater.

Structures, Properties and Potential Applications of Corncob Residue Modified by Carboxymethylation

“…This would inevitably lead to environmental issues and be harmful to the sustainable development. Currently, CR has been explored to produce hydrochar, carbon quantum, ethanol, biosorbent, and porous carbon in the literature [4,[7][8][9][10]. However, these CR derived products are far from industrial applications due to their poor performance and high cost of production.…”

Adsorption of lead(II) from aqueous solution using Africa elemi seed, mucuna shell and oyster shell as adsorbents and optimization using Box–Behnken design

“…Various methods for the removal of these heavy metals from industrial wastewater have been developed such as electrochemical treatment (Kobya et al 2016), coagulation/flocculation (Luo et al 2017;Gaikar et al 2016;Sen et al 2017), adsorption (Berber-Villamar et al 2018;Wang et al 2016a, b), ion exchange processes (Yang et al 2015;Ansari et al 2017), solvent extraction (Lam et al 2018) and membrane filtration (Samadder et al 2017;Aravind et al 2018). Among all the stated techniques, adsorption process appears to be the alternative method due to its excellent removal capacity, convenience, economic cost and simplicity (Lalchhingpuii et al 2017;Okoye et al 2018;Lu et al 2018;Lowe et al 2015).…”

Adsorption of Rhodamine B dye from aqueous solution onto acid treated banana peel: Response surface methodology, kinetics and isotherm studies

“…However, due to the complexity of the structure and thermal stability of synthetic dyes in water, biological methods of treatment have been less successful [5]. In recent years, several physico-chemical methods have been reported for the treatment of wastewater containing dye, including forward and reverse osmosis [6, 7], coagulation [8], coagulation-flocculation [9], Fenton, Photo–Fenton and solar Fenton reactions [10, 11], electrocoagulation [12], chemical oxidation [13], solvent extraction [14], ion exchange [15] and adsorption [16]. Among the conventional methods, adsorption is a widely applicable and superior technique owing to the low cost of treatment and ease of design and operation; the method has rapid kinetics and is very effective for the treatment of effluents [17, 18].…”