wastewater treatment by new high-performance activated carbon from semecarpus anacardium and quercus infectoria nutshells: applications- kinetic and equilibrium studies

This study utilized semecarpus anacardium (sa) and quercus infectoria (qi) nutshells as raw materials to manufacture activated carbon (ac) which is both inexpensive and possesses a large surface area. all materials were examined using fourier transform infrared (ft-ir) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (sem/edx), x-ray powder diffraction (xrd), and brunauer, emmett, and teller (bet) surface area methods. the effective synthesis of ac was validated by surface functional groups in ft-ir spectra and xrd diffractograms, which showed a broad peak in the region of 2θ=15-28° and a faint and wide peak in the range of 2θ=40-48°. the bet results indicated that the ac synthesized from sa and activated with koh (acsak) had the greatest surface area (717 m2/g), the most enormous pore volume (0.286 cm3/g), and mean pore diameters (<2nm). the synthesized ac in this research can be classified into micro-pore adsorbents entirely. finally, the resulting acsak was applied to methylene blue (mb) adsorption. adsorption studies demonstrate that the langmuir isotherm (r2=0.996) matches somewhat more accurately than the freundlich and temkin isotherms. our adsorption kinetics findings show that the pseudo-second-order model has the maximum fitness and accuracy on mb adsorption data in ac (r2 = 0.999).