Alternative biomass has recently received considerable attention as the base materials for manufacturing activated carbon. While the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) theory is widely used to quantify the specific surface area, it is reported that BET measurements could be unreliable for some biomass. The fractal dimension analysis also is utilized to correlate the surface characteristics to adsorption properties; however, the application of fractal analysis often produces biased results. Therefore, challenges remain to accurately quantify the differences in surface morphology that determine the adsorption properties of activated carbon. Previously, we had presented an innovative method that accurately quantifies the surface morphology of activated carbon manufactured from waste coffee grounds using scanning electron microscopic (SEM) images. In this abstract, we experimentally investigate adsorption kinetics for methylene blue (MB) dye onto manufactured activated carbon from waste coffee grounds and compare adsorption results to quantified surface morphology. Two types of activated carbon were manufactured from the waste coffee ground using 25 % and 50 % of H3PO4 to coffee by weight. To identify the spatial significance of activated carbon, we extracted the point patterns from the SEM images. Differences in surface morphology of activated carbon were computed by using Ripley’s K function and complete spatial randomness. Adsorption of MB onto the manufactured activated carbon was measured by a UV-vis spectrophotometer. Results show that our method is capable of correlating quantified surface morphology to experimental adsorption kinetics results.

SEM Image analysis for activated carbon to correlate adsorption kinetics of methylene blue

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.