Vanadium remediation from polluted wastewater using a novel non-conventional adsorbent

• A non-conventional low-cost adsorbent was synthesized, achieving 81% recovery of vanadium • The adsorption isotherm followed the Langmuir model with a correlation coefficient of 0.992. • The adsorption kinetics were best described by the intraparticle diffusion model with a correlation coefficient of 0.9907. • Morphological characterization of the adsorbent indicated that the buckthorn leaves contained multiple functional groups that contributed effectively to the capture of vanadium ions • The results indicate promising scalability This investigation studies the utilization of buckthorn leaves as a low-cost and environmentally friendly adsorbent to remove vanadium from simulated wastewater. Experiments were conducted using batches under various operating conditions. The obtained results indicated that the vanadium recovery efficiency reached 81% and was in direct proportion to the pH, agitation speed, and contact time, and inversely with other variables, while adsorption capacity reaching 0.1 mg/g. The optimum conditions for vanadium removal using this novel adsorbent are 150 min, 12 g, 8.0 mg/L, 350 rpm, and 6 for contact time, adsorbent dosage, initial vanadium concentration, agitation speed, and pH, respectively, and 25°C, while maintaining stable performance overall experiments. Morphological characterization of the material indicated that the buckthorn leaves contained multiple functional groups that contributed effectively to the capture of vanadium ions from the contaminated solution, according to Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) analysis. Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) examination revealed that the adsorption medium underwent significant changes due to the accumulation of target metal particles, and that the surface area decreased from 13.3 to 1.275 m²/g as a result of adsorption, according to the results obtained from the Brunauer, Emmett and Teller (BET)test. The results showed that the adsorption was spontaneous in the temperature range studied, that it had a negative entropy of 438 J/mol.K, and that it was exothermic with an enthalpy of 142.7 kJ/mol, which means that the adsorption is chemisorption. Kinetically the closest model to describing the adsorption was the intra-particle diffusion model, while Langmuir was the best model for representative of the obtained data isothermally compared to the other models, according to the correlation coefficients, which were 0.9907, 0.992, respectively.