Analysis of Packed Bed Adsorption Column with Low Cost Adsorbent for Cadmium Removal

In the current research, removal of cadmium from the effluent by using rice husk adsorbent is studied in packed bed with respect to various parameters like initial concentration, adsorbent dose, bed height and pH. Also the solute uptake data was analyzed for first and second order kinetic equations by varying these parameters. The effect of these parameters on kinetics of solute uptake is reported. It was observed that with increase in initial concentration from 10 mg/l to 50 mg/l, the exhaustion time decreased from 830 mg/l to 570 mg/l and break point time decreased from 330 minutes to 120 minutes. Also with increase in flow rate, exhaust time and break through time decreased significantly. The alkaline conditions favoured the adsorption with optimum pH of 6.The exhaustion and break through delayed with increasing bed height. The kinetics of the cadmium removal was affected by initial concentration and flow rate. At low initial concentration, it indicated second order kinetics. There was increasing shift from second to first order with increase in initial concentration. With increase in bed height from 30 to 40 cm there was shift from second to first order but with further increase in bed height, again shift towards second order kinetics was observed. The optimum bed height, initial concentration, flow rate and pH values were 50 cm,30 mg/l, 60 ml/min and 6 respectively. The adsorption efficiency was estimated to be 69 percent for optimum values of pH, initial concentration, bed height and flow rate.