Modification of activated carbon with anionic surfactant for dye removal

This study aims to enhance the effect of activated carbon modified anionic surfactant due to the lack of functional group in order to extract specific pollutant. The characteristic of the adsorbent, activated carbon and modified activated carbon was analysed. The adsorbents were used for the removal of methylene blue, cationic dye from aqueous solution. For characterisation of the activated carbon and SLS-AC, Fourier transforms infrared (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) were used. The effect of the parameters such as contact time and temperature for adsorption using activated carbon and SLS-AC were investigated to estimate the effect of adsorption performance. The surface area for the activated carbon was 572.537 mg2/g while for the SLS-AC was respectively reduced to 221.732 mg2/g. The addition of SLS surfactant has exhibited higher adsorption percentage of dye removal due to the presence of the functional group on the surface area activated carbon. Besides, the effect of contact time for SLS-AC can achieve maximum percentage 48.9% after 15 minutes contact time with initial dye 0.1 M concentration. Figure 5, 84.4% MB was removed at 50°C, which was higher than the activated carbon 81.1 % removal. According to the results, SLS-AC has shown the characteristic for applications in the removal of organic compounds in wastewater.