Column Study for Adsorption of Methylene Blue Dye using Azadirachta indica Adsorbent

Abstract

In this study, synthesised Azadirachta indica adsorbent was used for the removal of methylene blue dye using a packed bed column. The effect of feed flow rate, feed methylene blue dye concentration, and bed height of column on percentage removal of dye was studied. It was observed that the column bed exhausted rapidly at a higher flow rate and therefore, a breakthrough occurred faster. However, it was observed that bed exhaustion time increases on increasing the bed height from 2 to 10 inch at 10 mg/L feed dye concentration and feed flow rate of 40 ml/min. It was also found that the breakthrough curve is more dispersed and the percentage removal of dye increases on decreasing the feed methylene dye concentration from 150 to 10 mg/L. The percentage removal was found to be 96.89% at 20 ml/min of feed flow rate under 10 inch of bed height and 10 mg/L of feed dye concentration. The atomic absorption spectrophotometer and scanning electron microscope were used for estimating the effluent dye concentration from the column and morphological study, respectively.