Performance and kinetic studies on biosorption of Astrazon Blue dye by dried biomass of Baker’s yeast as a low cost biosorbent

Joseph Y. Farah¹ and Nour Sh. El-Gendy²*

¹National Research Center, El-Dokki, Cairo, (Egypt) ²Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute, Nasr City, Cairo, (Egypt)

ABSTRACT: The effects of adsorbent dosage, agitation speed, and initial dye concentration on adsorption of Astrazone Blue (F2RL 200%) basic dye onto dried biomass of Baker’s yeast have been investigated in this study. The specific uptake capacity of dye decreases with the increase of sorbent dosage. The maximum dye uptake has been obtained at moderate agitation speed of 150 rpm. The amount of dye adsorbed per gram biomass increases with increasing initial dye concentration and contact time. The kinetic experimental data of the effect of initial dye concentration were analyzed using four kinetic equations including pseudo-second-order model, intraparticle diffusion model, Elovich model and the modified Freundlich model. The best fit equation was identified by four error functions; residual root mean square error, chi-square test, sum of the squares of the errors and average relative error. Modified Freundlich model gave the lowest error function values and consequently best fitting the adsorption data. A design for a batch adsorption unit using data from previous isotherm studies has been done in this study. Comparative study for the cost of Astrazone Blue dye removal with dried biomass of Baker’s yeast and commercial activated carbon (NORTI) illustrated that the expected cost of removing dye with dried biomass of Baker’s yeast is about 18.79% of that of commercial activated carbon.

KEYWORDS: Biosorption; Astrazone Blue; Baker’s yeast; Kinetics; Error analysis; Process design

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