COD reduction of electroplating wastewater using activated carbon prepared from sugarcane bagasse: article

Commercially prepared activated carbon can be very expensive, thus, research on low cost adsorbents are vastly studied especially by using waste as the raw materials. In this study, sugarcane bagasse is the raw materials chosen as the precursor in preparing activated carbon. In wastewater treatment industry, activated carbon (AC) is a very common adsorbent used due to the highly porosity and large surface area and the application of activated carbon in reduction of chemical oxygen demand (COD) through carbon adsorption is a common type of treatment. COD parameter is important in determining the amount of contaminants in the wastewater as it evaluated the overall adsorption behavior. The aim of this study is to prepare and characterize the sugarcane bagasse activated carbon (SBAC) using physiochemical activation method where both chemical and physical activation are both performed for the activation step. The characterization analysis is conducted, focusing on the pore structure of SBAC by Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA), Fourier Transform Infrared Analysis (FTIR) and Brunauer- Emmett- Teller (BET). For TGA, rapid weight loss for the activated carbon happened starting the temperature 35⁰C until 130⁰C and comparing to other samples, sugarcane bagasse activated carbon has the least thermal stability. For FTIR analysis, the activated carbon showed four peaks indicating the existence of free and intermolecular bonded (O-H) group, C-H stretching and bending and C=O group. The SBAC also poses high BET surface area and pore volume. The second objective is to reduce COD value in electroplating wastewater by varying the contact time and the adsorbent dosage in a batch adsorption study. The experiment is conducted with time and adsorbent dosage as the manipulative variables. From the findings, the highest COD percentage removal achieved is 91% with 10 g of adsorbent per 100 mL of water sample, with 240 rpm mixing speed and 1 hour contact time.