This study involves several aspects of environmental research, namely, adsorbent preparation, characterisation and wastewater treatment. Lower ash tyre activated carbon was produced with demineralisation prior to the activation. Detailed physical and chemical characterisations of the produced activated carbon were conducted. The tyre demineralised activation carbons are generally mesoporous with the surface area upto 960m²/g....[ Read more ]

This study involves several aspects of environmental research, namely, adsorbent preparation, characterisation and wastewater treatment. Lower ash tyre activated carbon was produced with demineralisation prior to the activation. Detailed physical and chemical characterisations of the produced activated carbon were conducted. The tyre demineralised activation carbons are generally mesoporous with the surface area upto 960m²/g.

The adsorption capacity of four dyes, namely, acid dyes (Acid Blue 25, AB25 and Acid Yellow 117, AY117) and basic dyes (Methylene Blue, MB and Maxilon Red, MR) and phenol onto the produced carbons for both single and binary component systems was studied. Tyre activated carbon, C3 has the highest capacity among all of them with maximum capacities of 1.2mmol/g of AB25, 0.58mmol/g of AY117, 1.17mmol/g of MB and 0.7 mmol/g of MR, which is higher than the literature value for commercial activated carbon F400. However, in the case of phenol, the microporous F400 is better. Four single component isotherm equations were tested in this study, namely, Langmuir, Freundlich, Redlich-Peterson and Langmuir-Freundlich. The differences in the SSE values are actually not so significant, so in general, all four models do not show significant differences.

The binary component adsorption studies are presented and modelled with various binary component equilibrium isotherm including Extended Langmuir, Extended-Langmuir-Freundlich, Extended-Redlich Peterson, Extended Freundlich, P-factor, Interaction factor, and finally the IAST-Langmuir and IAST-Langmuir-Freundlich. For both acid and basic dye binary systems with the three tyre activated carbon C5, C7 and C9, the Extended Freundlich model was best fitted to the experimental data. This suggests significant non-ideal effects and heterogeneous surfaces of the tyre activated carbons. Overall, none of the predictive binary models can describe the adsorption data well; this means the general assumption of the idea system is not applicable.