A low-cost and environment friendly chitosan/aluminum hydroxide bead adsorbent for fluoride removal from aqueous solutions

A novel low-cost adsorbent named chitosan/Al(OH)₃·(CS/Al(OH)₃) bead was successfully prepared by employing AlCl₃·6H₂O aqueous solution as the solvent for CS. The CS/Al(OH)₃ beads were used for fluoride removal from water. The beads were synthesized using the chitosan and aluminum chloride with the mass ratio of 2:1 as the precursor and in situ generation of aluminum hydroxide sorbents in sodium hydroxide solution. Then, the beads were washed with distilled water to neutral and freeze dried. The sorbents were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDX), Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR), and X-ray diffractometry (XRD), respectively. Batch adsorption experiments were conducted to evaluate the parameters that affected the defluoridation capacity. The influencing parameters including pH, co-existing ions in water and initial temperature of the adsorption process were studied. The influence of temperature confirmed that the adsorption was spontaneous and endothermic. The adsorption isotherm of fluoride followed Langmuir isotherm model and the sorption kinetics was more suitable for pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The defluoridation capacity of chitosan/Al(OH)₃ calculated using Langmuir model was 23.06 mg/g (293 K, pH 4). The experimental results showed that the CS/Al(OH)₃ bead adsorbent is promising for the fluoride adsorption.