Adsorption of Methylene Blue from Solution Using Anionic Surfactant Modified Palm Seed Powder

Cationic dyes are widely utilized in plastic, textile, leather and tanning industries. High concentrations of these dyes in aquatic environments pose serious threat to human health and the environment due to their toxic profile. Therefore, various environmental protection agencies and governments have established standard control limits to the quality of domestic and industrial effluents before being discharged to water bodies. Among the various treatment processes, adsorption technique was employed in this study for the treatment of methylene blue (MB) simulated effluents under various operational conditions. Here, palm seed powder (PS) was employed as adsorbent for removal of MB from laboratory simulated colored effluent. The sorption capacity of the PS was improved through surface modification by anionic surfactant (sodium dodecyl sulfate). Comparatively, the modified palm seed powder (MPS) efficiently removed 93% of MB while only 57% removal was recorded by PS after 720 min treatment time. The MPS sorption capacity was affected by the presence of interfering ions (Na+ and Mg2+); however, about 18 mg/g of MB was removed even at salt concentration of 100 mg/L. Freundlich isotherm fits suitably the MPS experimental data more than Langmuir isotherm, indicating multilayer sorption process of MB on the heterogeneous MPS surface. The Weber–Morris models confirmed that intraparticle transport played a significant role in the sorption process. Keywords: Adsorption; modified palm seed powder, cationic dyes removal