The increasing concern
of dye contamination in wastewater results
in the toxicity of aquatic life and water quality, so wastewater treatment
is required to treat the low water quality standard for safety purposes.
Lemon peel beads-doped iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (LBF) and lemon peel
beads-doped zinc oxide (LBZ) were synthesized and characterized to
investigate their crystalline structure, surface morphology, chemical
compositions, chemical functional groups, and ζ potentials by
X-ray diffraction, field emission scanning electron microscopy and
focused ion beam, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, Fourier transform
infrared, and zetasizer techniques. Their effects of dose, contact
time, temperature, pH, and concentration for reactive blue 4 (RB4)
dye removal efficiencies were investigated by batch experiments, and
their adsorption isotherms, kinetics, and desorption experiments were
also studied. LBF and LBZ demonstrated semicrystalline structures,
and their surface morphologies had a spherical shape with coarse surfaces.
Five main elements of carbon (C), oxygen (O), calcium (Ca), chlorine
(Cl), and sodium (Na) and six main function groups of O–H,
CN, CC, C–OH, C–O–C, and C–H
were detected in both materials. The results of ζ potential
demonstrated that both LBF and LBZ had negative charges on the surface
at all pH values, and their surfaces increased more of the negative
charge with the addition of the pH value from 2–12. For batch
tests, the RB4 dye removal efficiencies of LBF and LBZ were 83.55
and 66.64%, respectively, so LBF demonstrated a higher RB4 dye removal
efficiency than LBZ. As a result, the addition of iron(III) oxide-hydroxide
helped in improving the material efficiency more than zinc oxide.
In addition, both LBF and LBZ could be reused in more than five cycles
for RB4 dye removal of more than 41%. The Freundlich model was a good
explanation for their adsorption patterns relating to physiochemical
adsorption, and a pseudo-second-order kinetic model was a well-fitted
model for explaining their adsorption mechanism correlating to the
chemisorption process with heterogeneous adsorption. Therefore, LBF
was a potential adsorbent to further apply for RB4 dye removal in
industrial applications.