Determination of Adsorption of Diesel onto a Poultry Waste: Chicken Feather

Chicken feather is a poultry waste. With the recent development of waste management strategy viz; waste recycle, re-use and waste reduction etc., chicken feather has been put to various uses such as in the production of animal feed, organic fertilizer, biodegradable plastic and others. It has been mentioned in some text/resource that chicken feather can be used to mop oil spill. However, there is scarce literature on the mopping account of hydrocarbon oil by chicken feather. This led to the study. In this study the equilibrium adsorption capacity (q_e) of diesel onto chicken feather, the amount of adsorbed diesel recovered from chicken feather and the amount of diesel retained by chicken feather was determined by simple kinetic studies and compared with that of a conventional synthetic sorbent used in mopping oil spill in the oil industry. This conventional synthetic sorbent served as standard. Both sorbents were compared under the same experimental condition and the experiment was carried out at room temperature 290C. Linearized adsorption isotherms of Langmuir, Freundlich, Elovich, Temkin and Dubinin-Radushkevich were used to verify the adsorption process of both sorbents. The result of the study shows that the equilibrium adsorption capacity (q_e) of diesel onto chicken feather is 11.04g/g, the time required to attain equilibrium adsorption is 80 minutes, while that of the standard is 10.20g/g at 60 minutes. This shows that chicken feather has a higher adsorption capacity. The best fitting isotherm for the adsorption process of both sorbents is the linearized form Ce/q_e versus Ce of the Langmuir adsorption isotherm with coefficient of determination (r² ) of 0.999 for both sorbents (chicken feather and standard). The validity of Langmuir model was check by calculating the average percentage error (APE %). The APE values obtained for chicken feather and standard are 0.0024 and 0.005 respectively. The low APE values show that Langmuir model is valid in describing the experimental data. This indicates that, one molecule of diesel is adsorbed on a layer of ground chicken feather/synthetic and there is no interaction between the adsorbed molecules of diesel.The constants of Langmuir isotherm; maximum adsorption capacity (qm) and intensity of adsorption/affinity constant (b) for chicken feather are 11.49g/g and 1.00 while for the standard they are 10.20g/g and 1.00 respectively. The b and qm values indicates that both sorbents have same affinity for diesel however, chicken feather has a larger surface area than standard and therefore adsorbs more diesel than standard. The favourable nature of the adsorption process of both sorbents was confirmed from the values of dimensionless separation factor equilibrium parameter KR .The KR values for both sorbents are 0.0022. The value shows that the adsorption process is favourable. About 10.00g/g and 8.00g/g of the adsorbed diesel can be recovered from ground chicken feather and conventional synthetic sorbent, while, 1g/g and2 g/g of the adsorbed diesel can be retained respectively. This make chicken feather a better sorbent when diesel recovery is required. To determine the mopping profile of diesel on water by chicken feather and synthetic sorbent, the experiment was repeated with mixture of dieselon water. The amount of water adsorbed together with diesel on water was negligible; 0.08dm³ adsorbed onto synthetic and 0.05 dm³ adsorbedonto chicken feather, which means that both sorbents can be used to mop diesel spill on land and water. The result of the study shows that chicken feather adsorbed more diesel per unit mass than the conventional synthetic sorbent used as standard in this study. Chicken feather is an efficient natural sorbent that can be used to mop diesel spill on land and water, and it is efficient for diesel recovery.