Applicability of Lanatana camara weed in abatement of hexavalent chromium metal ion from textile industrial effluents

Abstract

The adsorption of hexavalent chromium ion onto weed (Lanatana camara shoots, LS) was studied in this work. The effect of pH, adsorbent dose, contact time, initial metal concentration and particle size were optimised in batch mode experiments. The surface morphology and surface functional groups were identified by Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), respectively. The maximum adsorption capacity was observed to be 0.58 mg/g at pH 2. The Cr(VI) removal efficiency from textile industrial effluents by LS adsorbent was observed as 76.13%. The Langmuir isotherm model suited well than Freundlich isotherm model. The experimental data were analyzed by using two kinetic models: pseudo first order and pseudo second order model. Pseudo second order model followed better than pseudo first order kinetic model. This study showed that LS can be robustly applied for the abatement of hexavalent chromium ion from industrial effluents.