Using Activated Carbon Prepared from the Salsola Incanescens Plant for Removal of Carboxylic Acids from Aqueous Solutions

Abstract

Abstract In current work, activated carbon was prepared by burning a desert plant Salsola incanescens, at 250 C° for 2hrs. H2O2 was used to enhance the porosity of it, various analytical methods, such as (EDX), (FESEM), and (XRD) were used to examine the constituents of activated charcoal. The crystal structure of the activated carbon was revealed by the XRD data, and the surface pore shape was shown by the FESEM images. Furthermore, an elemental composition analysis using EDX was conducted to ascertain the composition of activated charcoal. The prepared activated carbon was employed as an adsorbent surface to remove benzoic and acetic acids. The effect of initial concentration, temperature, adsorbent dose, and contact time on the adsorption removal were studied. The application of both Freundlich and Langmuir adsorption isotherms confirmed a satisfactory agreement with the experimental data. The estimated thermodynamic parameters (ΔH, ΔS, and ΔG) show that the adsorption process is exothermic and is enhanced by high temperatures. The process was found to be spontaneous and accompanied by an increase in entropy, indicating that it is less homogeneous on the surface of the adsorbent compared to the solution.