Removal of copper from aqueous solution by Jamun seed and prediction of adsorption efficiency

Project Abstract / Summary : In the present work, the usefulness of Jamun seed wastes has been investigated for the removal of copper ions from aqueous solutions. Locally available Jamun Seed, a domestic waste product, was found to be a low cost and promising adsorbent for the removal of copper (II) from wastewater. The adsorption of copper on Jamun seed has been studied by using batch techniques and theoptimum conditions for adsorption were evaluated by changing various parameters such as adsorbent concentration, initial metal ion concentration, effects of pH and contact time. The maximum adsorption efficiency was found at initial copper (II) concentration of 20 mg/L, adsorption dose of 0.1 g/L and pH of the solution of 7.0. The equilibrium contact time was found at 360 min. The influence of variables was also simulated using a three layer feed forward artificial neural network (ANN) with back propagation training algorithm. The model was developed in terms of training, validation and testing of experimental data. The neural network architecture consisted of tangent sigmoid transfer function (tansig) at hidden layer with 11 hidden neurons, linear transfer function (purelin) at output layer and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) back propagation training algorithm. The neural network model predicted values were found in close agreement with the batch experiment result with correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.999 and mean squared error (MSE) of 0.0000000577. The experimental data were best fitted with the artificial neural network model. Also , the Jamun seed investigated in this study exhibited a high potential for the removal of copper from aqueous solution.

Why did you choose to work on this project topic : Water pollution due to heavy metals remains a serious environmental and public problem. It is well known that some metals can have poisonous or otherwise harmful effects on many forms of life. Among the numerous metals, which are significantly toxic to human beings and ecological environments, copper is a widely used material. There are many actual or potential sources of copper pollution. Copper may be found as a contaminant in food, especially shellfish, liver, mushrooms, nuts, and chocolate. Briefly, any processing or container using copper material may contaminate the product such as food, water or drink. Copper is essential to human life and health but, like all heavy metals, is potentially toxic as well. For example, continued inhalation of copper-containing sprays is linked with an increase in lung cancer among exposed workers. Hence, an effort was made to work on practical and economical method for the removal of copper from the waste water so as to replace the current tedious and expensive practices.

Project Category : Civil / Structural
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Institute/College Name: SRES, College of Engineering, Kopargaon.
City: Kopargaon
State: Maharashtra
Participating Team From: Final Year