Investigating the performance of carbon chemically activated with ammonium chloride for adsorption of metolachlor in the contaminated water

With industrial development and population growth, the emerging contaminants enter into the natural water resources. Therefore, adsorption potential of Ammonium Chloride-induced activated carbon (NAC) to remove metolachlor pesticide from contaminated water was investigated in this study.
The effects of operational conditions including solution pH, NAC concentration, metolachlor initial concentration and contact time on the removal of metolachlor by Ammonium Chloride-induced activated carbon (NAC) and standard activated carbon (SAC) were studied.
Over 92.4% of 50 mg/L metolachlor was adsorbed using 0.3 g NAC/L within 5 min, and by increasing the reaction time to 60 min the removal efficiency reached to 100%. Under similar experimental conditions, standard activated carbon (SAC) could only adsorb 20% of metolachlor within 5 min and increase of contact time to 40 min caused the improvement of metolachlor adsorption onto SAC to 48%. The adsorption onto SAC was not influenced by the contact time over 40 min. Kinetic analysis showed that experimental adsorption data for both NAC and SAC were best fitted to the pseudo-second-order model. The maximum adsorption capacities of metolachlor onto NAC and SAC calculated by the Langmuir model were 344.8 and 238.1 mg/g, respectively.
Generally, these results showed that developed NAC was an efficient adsorbent with high removal efficiency for eliminating the halogenated pesticides from the contaminated water streams.