Revista de biorremediación y biodegradación

Abstracto

Biosorption Studies and Kinetics on Textile Effluent Treatment Using Packed Bed Reactor

Bharath Ganesan, Karthikeyan Mayakrishnan, Venkatesaprabhu and Ponmurugan Ponnusamy

The utilization of Aspergillus niger biomass for the treatment of effluent collected from the dying units provides an insight into the potential of fungal biomass in treatment of textile effluent. The decolorization capability of the biomass was observed under shake flask studies using UV spectrophotometry and packed bed column studies were carried out for analyzing biosorption efficacy in a pilot scale. The process parameters maintained were, retention time varying from 80 to 26 min, flow rate from 2 ml/min to 6 ml/min and porosity of the column as 0.425. The dye decolorization by the fungal biomass and the metal adsorption was found to be maximum at 2 ml/min of flow rate and 80 minutes of retention time. The adsorption isotherms Langmuir and Freundlich were evaluated for the significance of the adsorption process. Specific metal uptake rate of the biomass has been studied to identify the rate of metal uptake by the biomass.