Cooked Food Waste—An Efficient and Less Expensive Precursor for the Generation of Activated Carbon

Abstract

Activated carbon was synthesized from cooked food waste, especially dehydrated rice kernels, by chemical activation method using NaOH and KOH as activating agents. It was then characterized by ultimate and proximate analysis, BET surface analysis, XRD, FTIR, Raman and SEM. The XRD patterns and Raman spectra confirmed the amorphous nature of the prepared activated carbons. Ultimate analysis showed an increase in the carbon content after activation of the raw carbon samples. Upon activation with NaOH and KOH, the surface area of the carbon sample was found to have increased from 0.3424 to 539.78 and 306.83 m2g-1 respectively. The SEM images revealed the formation of heterogeneous pores on the surface of the activated samples. The samples were then tested for their adsorption activity using acetic acid and methylene blue. Based on the regression coefficients, the adsorption kinetics of methylene blue dye were fitted with pseudo-second order model for both samples. Similarly, the Freundlich isotherm was found to be a better fit than Langmuir isotherm for both samples. The activity of thus prepared activated carbons was found to be comparable with the commercial carbon.

Optimizing microwave-assisted production of waste-based activated carbons for the removal of antibiotics from water

“…The main advantages of chemical activation over the physical processes are the lower costs of production and the higher S BET usually attained (Ao et al, 2018). Typically, AC materials are prepared under conventional heating in pyrolysis reactors (Akbar Babar et J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f al., 2019; Krithiga et al, 2017;Vighnesha et al, 2018), but in recent years, microwave irradiation has attracted considerable attention and has been used as an alternative heating method (Keey et al, 2018;Liew et al, 2019). When compared to conventional heating, the use of microwave radiation is promising for thermochemical treatment due to it is rapid, uniform, and volumetric heating, with lower energy consumption and higher production yields (Ao et al, 2018;Mansour et al, 2018).…”