Dried ridge gourd: An excellent source for ecofriendly activated carbon

Abstract

In the current work, the activated carbon has been prepared from a resource which is considered as the waste and ecofriendly. In addition to above, the used raw material also does not contain the polluting element such as Sulphur or any others. The activated carbon prepared from dried ridge gourd (scrubbing sponge-luffa) by chemical activation methods mitigates the above stated requirements. For the characterization of prepared activated carbon and also determination of the efficiency of the activated carbon as an adsorbents, various types of characterization methods such as BET surface area analysis, morphology verification by SEM, EDX and FT-IR, and Methylene Blue separation experimentation are performed, respectively. The BET SSA is found to be 1221.57 m2g-1, which is comparable with the values reported in literature. The characterization clearly reveals the structure is very similar to honey comb pattern and identified micro pore volume is 0.407 cm3g-1. The removal efficiency of Methylene Blue (MB) by activated carbon (adsorbent) ensures its suitability for the separations and it seems that the experimental data are concurred with Langmuir isotherm of monolayer adsorption. The whole adsorption process is divided into three different regimes on the basis of their controlling parameters, which makes easy to select the appropriate operating zone for a process.