Potential removal of phenol using modified laterite adsorbent

Abstract

Phenol is a notorious persistent bioaccumulative toxic substance. Being a primary pollutant, phenol has to be removed completely due to its toxicity even at low concentrations. Now-a-days the use of low cost adsorbents for the effective removal of contaminants from waste water poses a big challenge to the researchers. Modified laterite, a cheap and effective adsorbent was chosen as the adsorbent in the present study. The experiments were carried out to identify optimum values of different parameters that influence the process such as contact time, pH, initial concentration and adsorbent dosage etc. The kinetics of the adsorption process were also studied and found that pseudo second order model was the good fit. Three different isotherm models, viz., Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin were applied and observed that Freundlich model was obeyed with good agreement. The investigation shows that modified laterite as a low cost adsorbent, can efficiently remove phenol from waste water.