Estudio de simulación de la eliminación de CR (VI) en aguas residuales

Adsorption is a surface technique that is used to remove contaminants such as heavy metals using organic materials as bioadsorbents. Most of the adsorption studies have been carried out at the laboratory level, so there are very few studies that seek to predict the behavior of the process and the efficiency of the adsorbent at the industrial level. Therefore, the objective of the present study is to use computational tools to model an adsorption column packed at industrial scale to remove Cr (VI) in solution using Theobroma cacao L biomass as adsorbent material. For this purpose, Aspen Adsorption software was used to perform several simulations of an industrial scale adsorption column with different configurations to obtain a parametric evaluation using the Langmuir and Freundlich isothermal models with the Linear Global Resistance (LDF) kinetic model. The results obtained show that the Langmuir-LDF model presented adsorption efficiencies up to 96% while the Freundlich-LDF model up to 97%. On the other hand, the adsorption column simulation conditions that presented the best results for both cases were a column height of 4 m, initial Cr (VI) concentration of 2000 mg/L, and an inlet flow rate of 100 m3/day. This study is presented as a novel way in the engineering field on how computational tools have the ability to predict the possible behavior of adsorption columns packed with organic waste-based biomasses.