Application of laterite soil in removing chloride ion from drinking water

Abstract

Increasing salinity is a crucial issue for the people of coastal regions in Bangladesh. To resolve this problem, efficient and low-cost materials can be used as adsorbents to remove salinity from water. Among those, laterite soil (LS) is one of the efficient adsorbents in water treatment. This study demonstrates a low-cost salinity removal technique using laterite soil as adsorbent. The effect of burning temperature on raw laterite and synthetic laterite has been analyzed. The performance of the adsorbents has been observed in terms of efficiency in salinity removal. Both batch and column adsorption have been carried out to evaluate the adsorption capacity of raw LS and burned LS, respectively. Raw laterite shows maximum adsorption capacity of 21.24 mg/g in batch adsorption at an initial concentration of 900 mg/L. The optimum burning temperature for thermally treated LS has been found as 600 °C. However, SLS burned at 600 °C gives greater chloride ion removal efficiency (44.54%) than LS (38.23%) in removing salinity from water.