Investigating the Performance of Carbon Activated with Ammonium Solution inthe Removal of Sulfanilamide from the Contaminated Water

With industrial development and population growth, the emerging contaminants enter into the natural water resources. Therefore, in this study Adsorption potential of NH4Cl-induced activated carbon (NAC) was investigated to remove antibiotic sulfanilamide from contaminated water.

Materials & Methods:

The effect of operational conditions including solution pH, NAC concentration, sulfanilamide initial concentration and contact time were studied.

NAC and SAC had specific surface area of 1029, 1024 and mean pore volume of 2.64, 2.23nm, respectively. With increasing the NAC concentration to 1 g/L, sulfanilamide adsorption efficiency increased to 84.4% within 40 min. Then the adsorption slightly increased with the increase in the contact time to 120 min and reached to its maximum adsorption of 99.2%. The maximum adsorption percentage of sulfanilamide onto SAC under similar conditions reached to 49.2%. The kinetics analysis showed that experimental adsorption data for both NAC and SAC were best fitted to the pseudo-second-order model. The maximum adsorption capacity of sulfanilamide onto NAC and SAC, calculated by the Langmuir model, was 238.1 and 87/7 mg/g, respectively.

Generally, these results showed that NAC was an efficient adsorbent with high removal efficiency for eliminating the antibiotics from the contaminated water streams