Assessing the Efficiency of Marble Powder as a Non-Expensive Adsorbent in the Removal of Basic Red 46 Dye from Aqueous Solution

It is essential to remove dye products from wastewater. The main aim of present study was to investigate the efficiency of marble powder as an adsorbent for removal of BR 46 dye from aqueous solution.This study was performed experimentally in laboratory scale and in a batch system. In this research, the effect of initial dye concentration, absorbent dosage, contact time and pH on efficiency of dye removal were investigated. SEM, XRD and FT-IR were used to characterize the marble powder. Langmuir and the Freundlich adsorption isotherms were selected to explicate the interaction of the dye and adsorbent. Two kinetic models (the pseudo-first-order and the pseudo-second-order) were used to calculate the adsorption rate constants. The results showed that the efficiency of dye removal was increased with increasing adsorbent dosage and by increasing adsorbent dose from 0.05 to 2 g/l, dye removal efficiency was increased from 82.91 to 87.55%. The highest dye removal efficiency (56.9%) was obtained in pH= 9. By decreasing initial dye concentration from 30 to 250 mg/l, dye removal efficiency was increased from 90.84% to 56.7%. The appropriate time period to get the maximum of dye adsorption and equilibrium state was 90 min.The results also showed that the adsorption of Basic Red 46 followed the Langmuir isotherm model (r2= 0.89). Moreover, results indicated that the adsorption kinetics of the dye followed pseudo-second-order model. Compared to the other expensive dye removal methods, the marble powder can be considered as a non-expensive adsorbent for the removal of BR 46 from aqueous solution.