engleski

Heavy metal`s sorption on a humus

Humus is the dark organic matter in soil formed by the decomposition of plant material and animals. It is rich in nutrients and moisture retains in the soil. Considering that most of the heavy metal`s contaminated wastewaters unfortunately end up in the environment the main idea of this work was to test the humus ability to sorb the heavy metals from aqueous solutions, more precisely, the copper(II) and cobalt(II) ions from single solutions, as well as their mixtures. The sorption process was investigated by mixing suspensions of copper(II) ions, cobalt(II) ions or their mixture with certain quantity of humus, depending on different initial concentrations of copper(II) and cobalt(II) ions solutions at a constant temperature of 27°C, and stirring speed of 200 rpm for 96 h. The results have shown that the amount of copper(II) ions sorbed on humus and consequently the sorption efficiency of copper(II) ions is higher than the one corresponding to the cobalt(II) ions regardless of whether the sorption process was carried out in a binary or single ion solution. For better understanding of the sorption process, the results were tested by using various isotherm models.

Humus ; Sorption isotherms ; Heavy metals

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