Treatment of Gaseous Ammonia Emissions Using Date Palm Pits Based Granular Activated Carbon

Abstract

The present work investigated the application of granular activated carbon (GAC) derived from date palm pits (DPP) agricultural waste for treating gaseous ammonia. Respective findings indicate increased breakthrough time (run time at which 5% of influent ammonia is exiting with the effluent gas) with a decrease in influent ammonia and increase in GAC bed depth. At a gas flow rate of 1.1 L/min and GAC column length of 8 cm, the following breakthrough trend was noted: 1295 min (2.5 ppmv) > 712 min (5 ppmv) > 532 min (7.5 ppmv). A qualitatively similar trend was also noted for the exhaustion time results (run time at which 95% of influent ammonia is exiting with the effluent gas). The Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) findings for the produced GAC indicated some salient functional groups at the produced GAC surface including O–H, C–H, C–O, and S=O groups. Ammonia adsorption was suggested to result from its interaction with the respective surface functional groups via different mechanisms. Comparison with a commercial GAC showed the date palm pits based GAC to be having slightly higher breakthrough and exhaustion capacity.

Gas Phase Toluene Adsorption Using Date Palm-Tree Branches Based Activated Carbon

“…Thus, longer column lengths enhance both the breakthrough and exhaustion times. These findings are similar to earlier studies on the removal of gaseous ammonia and benzene using activated carbon produced from date fruit pits [ 23 , 28 ]. The increase in the breakthrough and exhaustion times with an increased AC column length is mainly due to the availability of more adsorbent based surface complexation sites, which in turn results in higher adsorption of gaseous toluene.…”

“…This results from AC’s high specific surface area, which gives rise to excellent adsorption efficiency, as noted for numerous gas phase pollutants including benzene [ 23 ], toluene/ethylbenzene/xylene/styrene [ 24 ], ammonia, [ 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ], amines [ 30 ], and landfill gas laden with BTEX compounds [ 3 ]. Recently, a great interest has also been shown in AC production from otherwise waste materials [ 31 ], including agricultural by-products such as palm shells [ 29 , 32 , 33 , 34 ], olive stones [ 35 ], and date fruit pits [ 23 , 28 ], which have also been successfully used to remove gaseous pollutants. In light of the above discussion, the present work investigated the efficiency of AC derived from date palm-tree branches (DPB) agricultural waste, for gaseous toluene (C 6 H 5 CH 3 ) treatment.…”

“…In comparison to some chemical activation methods such as employing zinc chloride [ 26 ], the phosphoric acid activation method is environmentally friendly. Additionally, phosphoric acid-based activation has been successfully used in earlier activated carbon production studies [ 23 , 28 , 40 ]. In this work, we evaluated the effect of several operational variables, including gas flow rate, and gas concentration on the ability of phosphoric acid activated DPB based AC to remove gaseous toluene under dynamic flow conditions.…”

Characterization and Application of Mangosteen Peel Activated Carbon for Ammonia Gas Removal

“…Ammonia (NH3) is a colorless gas with pungent odor which is emitted from agriculture, fertilizer industry, fossil fuel combustion, and some chemical industries (Vohra, 2020). The typical NH3 concentrations emitted from the industrial process can range from 5 to 60 ppm (Chung et al, 2001) and ammonia from agricultural activities comprises approximately 80%-90% of total anthropogenic ammonia emissions (Xu et al, 2019).…”

“…Adsorption using activated carbon is a simple and low-cost method (Guo et al, 2005) to purify NH3. Many reports have described the adsorption of ammonia gas by activated carbon (Domingo-Garcia et al, 2002;Ro et al, 2015;Vohra, 2020). This adsorption process depends on some factors such as the pore size, area, and surface chemistry (Bernal et al, 2018).…”