Sorption and Ion Exchange Behaviour of Natural Zeolite Packing

It is well known that zeolite is an efficient metal ions adsorbent. The excess charge of the zeolite building blocks i.e. (AlO4)-5 and (SiO4)-4 creating a negative surface charge that attract metal cations. Beside the surface charge, zeolite also has three dimensional pore structure and reasonably large surface area which also can be used as adsorption sites. Ease of cation uptake make it suitable for many process with adsorption and desorption application. Meanwhile, porous microbial immobilized media preparation for wastewater treatment becomes a growing research field recently. It is expected that by incorporation of suitable metals ion inside the porous structure can create a better performance of the microbial consortium in digesting organic contents inside the wastewater. For this application, the uptake capacity of metal ions by the media is crucial to be determined. This study was conducted to observe the sorption and ion exchange behaviour of zeolite-clay Raschig rings to iron and cobalt cations. The results shows that the adsorption patterns follow Langmuir isotherm with the highest cation exchange capacity (CEC) values of 1.881 meq/g