Abstract
The pollution resulting from the generation of waste tires is currently causing adverse environmental problems worldwide. Heavy metals present in water is also a significant cause of health and environmental problems in developing countries. This study focuses on the development of activated carbon using waste tire pyrolytic char as a precursor and using the resulting activated carbon to treat water containing Pb2+. The results obtained from the study showed that waste tire activated carbon could effectively remove Pb2+ from aqueous solution far better than waste tire pyrolytic char. The effects of process variables: Temperature (ºC), Contact time (min), and Initial metal concentration (mg/l) were studied and the optimum operating conditions were obtained as 25°C, 120 min, and 400mg/l for the temperature, contact time, and initial metal concentration, respectively. Adsorption kinetics revealed that the experimental data gave the best fit for the pseudo-second-order kinetic model. Adsorption thermodynamics illustrated that the adsorption process was exothermic and spontaneous in nature by calculating adsorption parameters ?H, ?G and ?S as -85.57 kJ/mol.K, 4.211 kJ/mol.K, and -0.279 kJ/mol.K respectively at 298.15K.
