EFFECT OF ADSORPTION PARAMETER ON THE REMOVAL OF NICKEL (II) BY LOW-COST ADSORBENT EXTRACTED FROM CORN COB

In today's world, water scarcity affects every corner of the world. More than 1.2 billion people do not have access to clean water resources. This problem happens due to several reasons such as climate changes, natural disasters, contamination of water catchment area, and many more. Since water is a necessity for living organisms to live, a sustainable solution to water deficiency should be thought of to avoid the same problem from happening continuously. To materialize the solution, thorough research on adsorption should be pursued to clean out contaminated water as it is a valuable resource. The solution should use adsorbents that are as cheap as possible to make it sustainable throughout the process. The objective of this research is to find out the parameters that can affect the performance of adsorbents, to calculate the effectiveness of each adsorbent to remove nickel ions from water, and to find out the economic potential of the adsorbent. Several parameters will be tested on the adsorbent to find out the optimum adsorption rate that an adsorbent could achieve. In conclusion, this research is targeted to find out whether corn cob could be used to produce cheap adsorbent without compromised the adsorption abilities of nickel in the contaminated water. The removal of nickel from the simulated aqueous solution using corn cob was carried out. The batch study was used; Parameters such as pH, contact time, adsorbent dose, and metal concentration were manipulated at room temperature. The findings showed that the full removal of nickel could be achieved within 100 minutes and at pH 8. The Langmuir isotherm was better suited to experimental results because the correlation coefficient for the Langmuir isotherm was higher than that for the Freundlich isotherm. The optimum adsorption capacity of Langmuir was 7.5 mg / g