In recent years, the pollution of water sources has become an important concern for industrial development. Especially, contamination with heavy metal ions leads to serious environmental problems and water-borne diseases. Therefore, the synthesis of different low-cost adsorbent materials with high removal efficiency are being researched extensively. In this study, biochar was obtained from torrefied hazelnut shell and used during polyaniline synthesis to obtain Polyaniline/Biochar composite for removal of copper(II) ions from wastewater. During the study, optimal temperature, pH, adsorbent amount and contact time parameters were investigated. The removal efficiency of developed novel composite adsorbent was found to be 89.23% under the optimum experimental conditions. Kinetic studies also confirmed the adsorption performance. The morphological analysis of adsorbent was characterized with thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). A new nonlinear model was developed for removal efficiency prediction of Polyaniline/Biochar composite adsorbent since the adsorption behavior has been found to be highly complex. The batch experiments of Polyaniline/Biochar were studied to train the model. The consistency between experimental targets and model outputs gives a high correlation coefficient (R 2 =0.9943) and shows that the proposed model can estimate the Cu(II) removal efficiency of adsorbent accurately. Modeling the behavior of Cu(II) adsorption will be helpful to describe a set of operating conditions for amplifying water treatment technology at the industrial level. Moreover, it can be supposed that the modeling approach developed in this study will expedite the advancement of material science in various application fields for a data-driven future wherein the knowledge can be aggregated.

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