Batch Adsorption Study For Removal Of Chloramphenicol Using Activated Carbon

Chloramphenicol (CPC) is a broad-spectrum bacterial type of antibiotic used for diseases such as plague, cholera, and typhoid fever. Consequently, chloramphenicol can cause pollution to the water sources when releases to the environment causing disruption to aquatic ecosystems and leading to microbial resistance. The objective of the research is to evaluate the performance of the application of commercial activated carbons for the removal of chloramphenicol and determine the optimum parameters for the CPC removal. The adsorption capacity of adsorbent is found to increase with respect to the increasing initial CPC concentration. This is due to high solution concentration create concentration gradient that provide driving force for mass transfer to occur, increasing temperature due to higher kinetics energy supplied and increasing adsorbent dose adsorption sites are more supplied. However, considering factor such as cost, the final optimum conditions are temperature 30 °C, initial concentration 10 mg/L and adsorbent dosage 1 g/L. The pseudo first order and pseudo second order models of adsorption kinetics was assessed and investigated. The findings of tests with a higher coefficient R2 were characterised by the pseudo-second order kinetics equation in all experiment carried out. The adsorption isotherm was modelled by using the Freundlich, Langmuir, Temkin isotherm. Based on the result obtained, the Langmuir model provided the best match to the test data, followed by Freundlich and finally Temkin. The thermodynamics properties also been studied where adsorption process of CPC onto activated carbon is a thermodynamically spontaneous, endothermic process and the sorbent uptakes processes is irreversible process since ΔS is greater than 0. The results revealed that activated carbon is a promising adsorbent for treatment of chloramphenicol in affected water