Factors that Affect the Absorption of Blue 406 Pro Dye and Red 308 Pro Dye on Activated Carbon

One of the application of activated carbon nowadays is treating wastewaters from the textile manufacturing plants. In this application, activated carbon is used to remove dyes from wastewater , before these wastewater are disposed into environment. Overwhelming number of treatment facilities in the textile plants use either continuous flow reactors or columns packed with absorbent (e.g. activated carbon). They both serve the same purpose: to get rid of the residues of dyes in waters. However, neither of these reactors had proven themselves to be 100% effective in treating wastewaters. The reason of this is restricted residence time of wastewaters in the reactor, thus absorption equilibrium is not always achieved. This is why it is of paramount importance to study absorption rate of textile dyes on the surface of activated carbon. However, the flow rate of wastewaters through column with activated carbon is not the only factor that influences absorption equilibrium of textile dyes. Other important parameters that influence the capacity of activated carbon to textile dyes are: acidity of the solution (pH), ionic strength, type of activated carbon and, of course, the dye type. In this study, the factorial analysis software (Minitab 17) was used to efficiently evaluate the significance of each of these factors on adsorption efficiency of activated carbon. The novelty and scientific interest of this investigation was in evaluating factors collectively, under various statistical levels (3³ x 2² factorial design). In this study I found that PH, type of carbon and time have an impact on adsorption significantly