Heavy metals are one of the most persistent and prevalent contaminates in the aquatic environment. Heavy metals such as chromium are known to causes many different diseases including various forms of cancer. The removal of chromium from aqueous solution, especially in the hexavalent form is difficult.  New technologies, techniques and/or new materials have to design to effectively and efficiently remove chromium from the aqueous environment. The current project focuses studying the effects of pH, time, temperature, binding capacity on biochar’ generated from agricultural waste produces, in this case pineapple waste. Pineapple skins were dried, ground, and sieved to pass through a 125 μm sieve.  The ground pineapple skins were pyrolyzed to produce a biochar material. The biochar was analyzed using FTIR from the data was collected from 600 to 4000 cm<sup>-</sup>1 and SEM/ EDS was used to help characterize the potential functional groups on the biochar. The batch pH binding study showed the binding of Cr(VI) bound optimally at lower pHs. The maximum binding pH Cr(VI) bound occurred at pH 2.  The binding of the Cr(VI) ions was found to follow the Langmuir isotherm with a binding capacity of 4.35 mg/g. Whereas Cr(III) was found to bind optimally at pH 4 with and binding capacity of 6.44 mg/g at room temperature.  In addition, thermodynamic and kinetic data analysis was performed to aid in describing the binding process of Cr(III) and Cr(VI) to the biochar.<br/>

Removal of chromium(VI) and chromium(III) ions from aqueous solution using bio-char generated from agricultural waste products

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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