Treatment of Wastewater by Material Based on Dates Rods

Abstract

Many methods are available for the elimination of pollutants from wastewaters including physico chemical and biological treatment techniques (solvent extraction, chemical oxidation by ozone, ion exchange by resins, photocatalytic, electrodialysis filtration and adsorption. However, these methods are not preferable due to their high cost of investing, operating and equipping [1][2][3]. Over the last few years, the use of adsorption to remove pollutants from aqueous solutions is a powerful technology especially using locally available adsorbents [4]. Agricultural waste materials are cost effective and eco-friendly materials due to their unique chemical composition, availability, low cost, being renewable, and other many factors that attract many researchers toward such studies. This work concerns the use of date rods as an agricultural waste material in wastewater treatment. The date rods waste can be an alternative and favorable adsorbent material for pollutants since it is abundantly available in Algeria and can be considered as cost effective sorbent. To our knowledge, minor works were carried on date rods to remove pollutants from contaminated solutions [5][6][7].The authors indicated that date rods have the average composition of most of lignocellulosic precursors [6]. A proximate analysis of this material has shown the following composition (Ash 5%, Moisture 3%, Volatile matter 67.24% and fixed carbon 24.76%). For other characteristics of date rods, the X-Ray diffraction of the raw material sample i.e. the date rods, a broad peak appearing at 2θ = 21.786° is a typical silica characteristic, which can be attributed to the presence of disordered cristobalite [6,8]. On the other hand, analysis of nitrogen adsorption isotherm of the raw date rods results a specific surface area and a pore volume of 5.9 m 2 /g and 0.07 cm 3 /g respectively [9].