Abstract
The use of indigenous natural materials and their modification toward fruitful application is one of the important subjects. Thermal modification of Rice Husk at 400
C resulted into Rice Husk Char (RHC) which was chemically modified with KOH and was labeled as KOH Modified Rice Husk Char (KMRHC). Both RHC and KMRHC were characterized by using, Fourier transformed infrared (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-rays (EDX) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) before and after their use as adsorbents. The prepared material was applied for the removal of toxic dyes, Direct Blue (DB) and Titan Yellow (TY) from aqueous media. The maximum adsorption capacity of DB and TY dyes on KMRHC were inspected as 30.9 mg/g and 28.6 mg/g, respectively at pH 4 using initial dye concentrations of 80 mg/L containing 2500 mg/L of the adsorbent dose with agitation speed of 240 rpm at 303 K. At the same experimental conditions the highest percentage removal of DB and TY on the adsorbent were observed as 96.6% and 89.3%, respectively. Thermodynamics studies of the adsorption of DB and TY dyes on KMRHC inferred for exothermic and spontaneous process. The value of ΔS is negative which suggested that randomness decreases at the interface of adsorbent-adsorbate during the adsorption. The kinetics study indicated that the experimental data of the adsorption process for both dyes, best fits to pseudo-second order kinetic model. The equilibrium data was tested on Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin adsorption isotherm models. It was observed that the data are best fit to the Langmuir isotherm model (R
> 0.99), which suggested that the adsorption process is dominated by chemisorption approach. The overall results suggest that various parameters of the adsorption process were not only affected by the variation in experimental conditions but also by the chemical structure of the adsorbate molecules for the same adsorbent.