Abstract
Recently, there has been an increasing concern in finding sorbents for radionuclide removal from natural sources. AS-BFS sorbent (aluminum silicate composites derived from blast furnace slag) is a suitable candidate for this purpose; due to economic and environmental reasons. Blast furnace slag (BFS) is a by-product of the iron and steel industry plants. The development of a cost-effective route for recycling and utilization assessment of BFS is an urgent task. AS-BFS was prepared from BFS and its physicochemical properties were determined. The elemental composition of the AS-BFS is mainly oxygen (44%), Si (34%), and Al (19%), with traces of titanium, iron, chloride, and calcium. Experimental potentiality regarding sorption characteristics of AS-BFS to thorium ions was explored via the batch method. AS-BFS showed good adsorption capacity for thorium (obtained after 240 min) from aqueous streams (39.7 mg/g). The sorption process is fitted to the mono-layer adsorption model at optimum conditions. It was also proved that adsorption kinetics follows the pseudo-second-order model. The desorption results revealed that thorium ions (93%) could be eluted using 1M HNO3. Hence, the research work indicates that the thorium sorption method with AS-BFS is cost-effective, efficient, and recommended for thorium removal from natural sources.