Vat dye sorption onto crude dehydrated sewage sludge

In this work, sewage sludge is used as a textile dye adsorbent. A sample of crude dehydrated sewage sludge issued from an urban wastewater treatment plant (high-rate aeration, activated sludge process, Sahline, Tunisia) is utilized for vat dye retention. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the efficiency of the crude material on vat dye sorption. However, no treatment to modify any of the adsorbent properties was considered. Although the relatively low specific surface area (about 3.2 m(2) g(-1)) compared to more conventional adsorbents, the used material shows very interesting retention capacities when used with water pollutants. The pseudo, first and second order kinetic models have been used to investigate the retention mechanism. When linearized, the pseudo-second order fit, for the both used dyes, in a better way the obtained experimental results than the pseudo-first order kinetic model. For equilibrium dye uptake amount it is found that the used material has a capacity (Langmuir Freundlich monolayer) of 73.1 mg/g to fix the VAT RED 10 and 58.7 mg/g to fix the VAT ORANGE 11. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.