Kinetics and Adsorption Isotherms Studies of Acridine Orange Dye from Aqueous Solution by Activated Charcoal

The goal of this research is to evaluate the efficiency of charcoal as low coast and effective adsorbent for acridine orange (a cationic dye) from aqueous solution at room temperature. Effect of initial pH (2-8), shaking time (5min. - 1hour), adsorbent dose (0.1gm- 0.9gm) and dye concentration (37mg/30ml-185mg/30ml) were investigated. Results demonstrated that charcoal act as good adsorbent for the removal AO where 99.15% of the dye was adsorbed within 30 minutes. For the maximum dye removal efficiency (100%), optimum conditions were obtained at pH 8 (99.24%), adsorbent dose of 0.9g and dye concentration of 185 mg with charcoal. Kinetics of adsorption was investigated as well as Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms were employed to describe equilibrium studies. The Langmuir adsorption isotherms models and pseudo second order kinetics fitted the experimental data best with high regression coefficient R². The results of the present studies points to the potential of charcoal as an effective adsorbent for the removal of dye from contaminated water sources.