International Journal of Marine Science 2015, Vol.5, No.29, 1-7
2
laven, 1981). Acute lead poisoning in humans
causes sever destruction in kidney, reproductive
system, liver, brain and central nervous system. Mild
lead poisoning causes anemia, the victim may have
headache and sore muscles and may generally feel
fatigue and irritable. Lead is also toxic to aquatic
organisms. The concentration of lead in water below
the world health organization standard (50 mg/l)
cannot be considered as a serious of lead intake
(Fugas and Saric, 1981). The accumulation of
relatively small amounts of lead over along period of
time in human body can lead to the malfunctioning
of the organs and chronic toxicity (Stoker and Seager,
1976). According to the WHO, the maximum
permissible limit (MPL) of lead in drinking water is
(0.05 mg/l) (WHO, 1984). For these reasons, copper
and lead must be removed as much as possible from
industrial effluents. Several methods has been
reported such as cementation of Pb(II) on spheres, on
affixed bed contractor, adsorption on inert material
treated with chelating reagent having selective affinity
for Pb(II), non aqueous solvent extraction using
organo-phosphorous compounds and chemical
treatment followed by removal as precipitated
carbonated (Taher et al., 2011), precipitation, ion
exchange, electro chemical reduction, exploration,
reverse osmosis, etc. Most of these methods are very
costly and economically unfavorable. Adsorption is
effective, cheap method among the chemical
treatments (Hawari et al., 2009). A number of materials
have been used to remove heavy toxic metals from
water such as sawdust (Bulut and Tez, 2007),
magnetic egg shell Fe
3
O
4
powder (Jianwe
et al., 2011),
nation 117 membrane (Nasef and Yahaya, 2009),
activated carbon from pesia populnea bark
(Prabakaran
et al., 2011),
Conocarpus erectus
leaves
(Al-tameemi
et al., 2012), activated carbon
synthesized from water melon shell and walnut shell
(Moreno-Barbosa
et al., 2013). The present study is to
investigate the possible use of locally porcellanite as an
adsorbent material for removal of Cu(II) and Pb(II)
ions from aqueous solution. The effect of adsorbent
dose, contact time, initial metal ion concentration,
temperature of solution and pH of the medium were
calculated and discussed.
1 Materials and Methods
1.1
Preparation of adsorbent
Porcellanite rock was obtained from the General
Company for Geological Survey and Mining,
Baghdad, Iraq, washed with deionized water to be
completely free from dirt, dried in an oven at 120
°
C
for a period of 3h, then ground and sieved in, to
different particle sizes ranges between 75 to 300 µm,
the powder was preserved in glass bottles for use as
adsorbent.
1.2
Chemical reagents
Metal salts used was of analytical reagent grade
(Merk). Deionized water was used for the
preparation of solution. Stock solutions of different
concentrations (0.02-4 mg/l) of Cu(II) and (0.5-12 mg/l)
of Pb(II) were prepared by dissolving exactly the
amount of metal salt in deionized water.
1.3
Adsorption studies
Batch adsorption method was employed for the
study of adsorption of Cu(II) and Pb(II) onto
adsorbent. Adsorption of ions was carried out in 50ml
stopper conical flask by adding 0.5g of porcellanite of
particle size of 75 µm to 50 ml of 50 mg/l of Cu(II) and
Pb(II) ions. All experiments were done at room
temperature, often gentle shaking for desired time at
120rpm. The contents were filtered through filter paper
(Qualitative filter paper). Concentrations of ions in the
filtrate were then determined by using flame atomic
absorption spectrophotometer (Pg instruments AA500).
The amount of ions adsorbed were calculated based on
the difference between the ions concentration in
aqueous solution before and after adsorption from
relation (Chu and Hashim, 2001).
Qe = V(C
0
– C
e
)/m ........... (1)
Where; Q
e
is the equilibrium adsorption capacity
(mg/g), V is the volume of solution (l), m is the
weight of the adsorbent (g),
Co
= Initial
concentration of solution,
Ce
= Concentration of the
solution after adsorption.
2 Results and Discussion
2.1
Characterization of the adsorbent
FT-IR apparatus type Shimadzu (400-4000 cm
-1
)
was used in order to identify the functional groups in
the powder of porcellanite. The FTIR spectra as show
in Figure 1 indicate the appearance of strong band in
the region (3460-3621 cm
-1
) attributed to stretching
vibration of hydroxyl group, the band at 1138 cm
-1
belong to the stretching vibration of the (Si = O) group,
the band at 476.42 cm
-1
related to the stretching vibration
