Abstract
This work was aimed at the study of the adsorption mechanism of Reactive Blue 5G dye on activated carbon derived from babassu shells and pyrolyzed oil shale residue. Experiments were undertaken employing a fixed bed reactor at 30°C using continuous systems. To minimize diffusional resistances, the influence of the flow rate was investigated via breakthrough curves at a feed concentration of 35 mg/l. Breakthrough curves for flows in the range 2–10 ml/min were carried out using bed height of 15.5 cm for activated carbon and 9.5 cm for pyrolyzed oil shale residue, with an inlet diameter of 1.01 cm. From the calculated mass-transfer parameters, it was shown that the minimum resistance to flow occurred at 4 ml/min for activated carbon and at 2 ml/min for pyrolyzed oil shale residue. It was concluded that the sizes of the pores in the adsorbents play an important role in the adsorption mechanism.