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In the present work, the adsorption capacity of anthill was investigated as a low‐cost adsorbent to remove the heavy metal ions, lead (II) ion (Pb2+), and zinc (II) ion (Zn2+) from an aqueous solution. The equilibrium adsorption isotherms of the heavy metal ions were investigated under batch process. For the study we examined the effect of the solution's pH and the initial cations concentrations on the adsorption process under a fixed contact time and temperature. The anthill sample was characterized using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), X‐ray fluorescence (XRF), and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) techniques. From the SEM analysis, structural change in the adsorbent was a result of heavy metals adsorption. Based on the XRF analysis, the main composition of the anthill sample was silica (SiO2), alumina (Al2O3), and zirconia (ZrO2). The change in the peaks of the spectra before and after adsorption indicated that there was active participation of surface functional groups during the adsorption process. The experimental data obtained were analyzed using 2‐ and 3‐parameter isotherm models. The isotherm data fitted very well to the 3‐parameter Radke–Prausnitz model. It was noted that Pb2+ and Zn2+ can be effectively removed from aqueous solution using anthill as an adsorbent.

The development of a process for the production of hydrogen through water-gas shift reaction has been developed and simulated in this work using Aspen HYSYS. This was achieved by picking the pieces of process equipment of the plant from the appropriate section of the Aspen HYSYS environment and connecting them together through appropriate streams. In addition, the components involved in the process were selected from the Aspen HYSYS databank. Peng-Robinson Stryjek-Vera (PRSV) was used as the fluid package of the developed process for property estimation during the simulation. The reaction of the process was modelled as an equilibrium type, the equilibrium constant of which was estimated using Gibbs Free Energy. From the results obtained, it has been established that pure hydrogen can be obtained from a plant comprising of a mixer, a reactor (with approximately 80.07% conversion of the reactants), a separator and two heat exchangers based on the fact that the mole fraction, the mass fraction and the volume fraction of hydrogen obtained from the simulation carried out when carbon monoxide and steam were passed into the process plant at room temperature (25 °C) and boiling temperature of water (100 °C), respectively under atmospheric pressure was approximately 1.

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