Biosorption of copper ions by marine brown alga fucus vesiculosus

Abstract

Copper is present in different types of industrial effluents, being responsible for environmental pollution. Biosorption of heavy metals can be an effective process for the removal and recovery of heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. The biomass of marine algae has been reported to have high uptake capacities for a number of heavy metal ions. In this paper, the adsorption properties of a pre-treated biomass of marine algae Fucus vesiculosus it was collected near Bushehr, Persian Gulf in Iran, for Cu (II) were investigated. Equilibrium isotherms and kinetic studies were carried out for the biosorption of Cu (II) ions from aqueous solution using the algae brown biomass from batch adsorption experiments. Langmuir, Freundlich and DubininRadushkevich (D-R) isotherm models were applied to describe the biosorption of the Cu (II) ions onto FV biomass. The equilibrium time was about 340 min and the adsorption equilibrium data were well described by the Langmuir’s equation. Langmuir model fitted the equilibrium data better than the Freundlich isotherm. The maximum adsorption capacity has been extrapolated to 1.85 mmol g_1. All these observations indicate that the Copper biosorption on FV is mainly based on ion exchange mechanism and this biomass could be then a suitable sorbent for the removal of heavy metals from wastewaters. This study demonstrated that the biomass of FV could be used as an effective biosorbent for the treatment of Copper (II) containing wastewater streams.