Improving efficacy of Cr (VI) adsorption process on sustainable adsorbent derived from waste biomass (sugarcane bagasse) with help of ant colony optimization

•Chemically activated sugarcane bagasse based activated carbon as agricultural biomass adsorbent.•Optimized isotherms and kinetics model parameters to describe chromium removal adsorption process.•Ant colony optimization embedded with inverse modeling for estimation of optimal parameters.•Novel approach to identify best suitable adsorption rate expressions that represent possible mechanisms. A hexavalent form of chromium, which is a major pollutant found in water bodies, has lethal impacts on aquatic life and human beings. Among various effluent treatment techniques, the adsorption process was considered as an effective technique, but the cost of adsorbents hinders the viability of this process. In this research study, sugarcane bagasse based agricultural biomass waste in the form of activated granular carbon is used as an adsorbent to study its sustainability for chromium removal from effluent water in a batch process. The efficacy of the process was evaluated by validating various equilibrium isotherm and kinetic models. As the contact temperature is increased, resulted in a higher percentage of chromium removal for all three different initial concentrations. Adsorbent prepared at higher activation resulted in lower chromium removal. A novel inverse modeling technique integrated with hybrid evolutionary ant colony optimization technique was employed to estimate the isotherm/kinetic parameters. The systematic analysis revealed the mechanisms, inherent characteristics in the adsorption process, which forms the base in the design of industrial adsorption process and thus optimize the process parameters.