Study of atrazine adsorption kinetics by using an activated carbon synthesised from water hyacinth

¹ Division of Industrial Fermentation Technology, Faculty of Agro-Industry, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok, Thailand
² Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok, Thailand

^* Corresponding author: patthranit.wo@kmitl.ac.th

Abstract

In this work, atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in Thailand, was removed from water by activated carbon synthesized from water hyacinth. Before adsorption, 3 types of activated carbons used as adsorbents were prepared by different chemical treatment methods; untreated activated carbon (AC), HCl-treated activated carbon (HCl-AC) and NaOH-treated activated carbon (NaOH-AC). After pyrolysis, NaOH-AC became ash, so it was not suitable for using as an adsorbent. Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) and CHNS methods were used to characterised 2 other adsorbents and the results showed that HCl treatment could improve the surface area and carbon content. This led to the better performance of HCl-AC for removing atrazine from water comparing to AC confirming by the adsorption experiments. In addition, the adsorption kinetics of HCl-AC, the best adsorbent in this research, was investigated by fitting with 4 kinetics models. The results showed that pseudo-second-order was the best kinetics model describing that the atrazine adsorption of HCl-AC was limited by adsorption and 2 active sites of adsorbent were required for adsorbing 1 molecule of atrazine.