Adsorption of Phenol onto Aluminum Oxide Nanoparticles: Performance Evaluation, Mechanism Exploration, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of Thermodynamics

Abstract

The removal of phenolic compounds from aqueous solutions using novel adsorption techniques becomes a key research item. Of those, nanoparticles in particular, the low-cost and the high-strength aluminum oxide nanoparticles showed promising results in pollutant uptake and increase in the adsorption efficiency. This study examined various physicochemical process parameters such as temperature, pH, initial phenol concentration, and adsorbent doses, in addition to the impact of those parameters on the adsorption removal mechanism of phenol. The results highlighted that aluminum oxide nanoparticles successfully exhibited superior phenol removal from an aqueous solution in addition to a high potential regeneration of the consumed nanoparticles by HCl. For the adsorbent mass of 0.5 g, phenol adsorption uptake reached 92%. Kinetic studies performed using several models demonstrated the data best fitting with a pseudo-second-order kinetic model. Examining equilibrium studies of various isotherms, the adsorption data of phenol into aluminum oxide nanoparticles was confirmed to be controlled by film diffusion and best represented by the Langmuir isotherm. The maximum capacity of adsorption was 16.97 mg/g. For thermodynamics studies, the results indicated that the adsorption process can vary between endothermic and exothermic reactions. Such relative differences in heat generation and spontaneity in adsorption processes were demonstrated and confirmed by principal component analysis (PCA). This evidence is key for future investigations for the efficiency of adsorption conditions concerning the contaminant type and adsorbate compounds.

Catalytic green synthesis of Tin(IV) oxide nanoparticles for phenolic compounds removal and molecular docking with EGFR tyrosine kinase

“…Adsorption decreases slightly, and this may be due to the electrostatic repulsion interaction between the nano-sorbent and the adsorbate (negative charge holders). The achieved results agree with the previous literature's data 10 .

Figure 9 ( a ) Impact of the pH on removal efficiency for PHE, P-NP, and P-MP (Conditions: nano-sorbent dosage, PHE (0.20 g), P-NP, and P-MP (0.10 g), agitation time, 30 min; starting phenolic solutions concentration, 3 ppm; at 25 °C), and ( b ) Phenolate anions formation in aqueous media.

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“…In addition, it was observed that the adsorption capacity (amount) for PHE, P-NP, and P-MP were 9.72, 9.63, and 8.28 mg/g, respectively. The adsorption capacity remained constant as the nano-sorbent dosage decreased; this suggests a preference for using NPs as absorbent surfaces of target phenolic compounds 10 . Therefore, the nano-sorbent dosage was taken as 0.20 g of PHE, whereas 0.10 g of P-NP and P-MP in further experiments.…”

Synthesis of Low Cost Activated Carbon from Agriculture Wase for Wastewater Treatment

“…Although biological wastewater is considered the most widely used system to treat wastewater, it is not suitable for many industrial wastes that contain inhibitory substances for the growth of bacteria [1]. Therefore, adsorption is considered an vital process in industrial wastewater treatment and can be regarded as the most cost-effective and easy process for removing heavy metals from industrial wastewater [2,3]. Activated carbon has been the adsorbent extensively used over the past years.…”

Influence of co-substrate existence, temperature, pH, and salt concentration on phenol removal, desalination, and power generation using microbial desalination cells

“…Substrate removal efficiencies, desalination efficiencies, and Coulombic efficiencies (CEs) were obtained, as described elsewhere (Ragab et al 2019a;Koomson et al 2022). To evaluate the relationship and variation between pH treatments, and to check the clusters and differences between them, a PCA and a cluster analysis were conducted using Minitab (Safwat et al 2022). The average values of duplicate cells were reported.…”