Authors: Chiara Pennesi Francesco Vegliò Cecilia Totti Tiziana Romagnoli Francesca Beolchini
Publish Date: 2012/02/29
Volume: 24, Issue: 6, Pages: 1495-1502
Abstract
The present study was aimed at assessing the performance of different nonliving macrophytes sampled in the Adriatic coast in arsenicV sorption Full factorial experiments were carried out where the main factors were the macrophyte species brown algae Cystoseira Dictyopteris and Eisenia green algae Caulerpa and Ulva red algae Ceramium Gracilaria and Porphyra and seagrass Zostera biosorbent washing pretreatment deionized water acid pH 2 and basic pH 10 equilibrium pH in the range 1 to 8 under relatively high 10 mg L−1 and relatively low 100 μg L−1 arsenic concentration All species exhibited significant adsorption Indeed they showed a good performance with the highest observed value of about 13 ± 01 mg g−1 for the red alga Ceramium and the seagrass Zostera comparable with those of activated carbon and other lowcost adsorbents reported in the literature under similar experimental conditions Moreover red algae known in the literature to be bad cationic metal sorbents showed very good arsenic sorption performance This work shows that the performance of arsenic biosorption depends on many factors the different composition and structure of outer layer of the macrophytes arsenic speciation and functional group availability under different pH and eventual counterion interactions with arseniate
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