Modelling and efficiency evaluation of the continuous biosorption of Cu(II) and Cr(VI) from water by agricultural waste materials

As a result of intensive anthropogenic activities, population growth and unplanned urbanization, enormous quantities of organic and inorganic pollutants are discharged into the environment every year. The primary hazardous substances of concern regarding their environmental load and health effects are heavy metals. Heavy metal pollution of aquatic ecosystems, including resources of drinking water and water intended for food processing, has been of increasing interest. Biosorption technology is a promising strategy, as it utilizes industrial or agricultural wastes to remove metals from aqueous media passively, and they represent efficient, cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional adsorbents such as activated carbon. In this paper, the efficiency of biosorption of copper and chromium ions was examined using different agricultural waste biomass – sugar beet shreds, poplar sawdust and wheat straw. The possibility of applying a parallel sigmoidal (PS) model to describe the biosorption process was investigated to confirm its applicability to different types of biomass and various kinds of heavy metal ions. The results showed that the biosorption of copper ions using poplar sawdust and wheat straw consist of two steps. The moiety of one step in the overall process, defined by the parameter p, was determined to be 0.85 for poplar sawdust and 0.86 for wheat straw. These values, being less than 1, clearly indicate that the process consists of two simultaneous, kinetically different steps that shift in their dominance over the process and thus could be successfully modelled by the PS model. These studies also deal with the phenomenological examination of an unusual breakthrough curve obtained for the chromium ions biosorption by sugar beet shreds, by the comparative view of the process flow and changing the pH of the effluent. The clarification of the appearance of a double curve with a negative trend in one part allows adjusting the biosorption conditions to avoid the initial blockage of chromium ion binding to the adsorbent and thus increase the adsorption process efficiency.