Development of bench-scale bio-packed column for wastewater treatment from optical emission spectrometry

An eco-friendly and inexpensive technique for wastewater treatment originated from inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) is presented within this paper. The proposed process comprised of loading waste crab shells in packed column for adsorption of heavy metal ions, followed by desorption using 0.01M HCl. An exhaustive physical and chemical characterization of ICP-OES wastewater revealed the complex nature of effluent, including the presence of 15 different metals and metalloid under strong acidic condition (pH 1.3). Based on the preliminary batch experiments, it was identified that solution pH played a major role in metal sequestration by crab shell with pH 3.5 identified as optimum pH. Rapid metal biosorption kinetics along with complete desorption and subsequent reuse for three cycles was possible with crab shell-based treatment process. Continuous flow-through column experiments confirmed the high performance of crab shell towards multiple metal ions with the column able to operate for 22h at a flow rate of 10mL/min before outlet concentration of arsenic reached 0.25 times of its inlet concentration. Other metal ions such as Cu, Cd, Co, Cr, Pb, Ni, Zn, Mn, Al, and Fe were only in trace levels in the treated water until 22h. The performance of the treatment process was compared with trade effluent discharge standards, and the process flow diagram along with cost analysis was suggested. © 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.