Tea fiber waste as an adsorbent to remove phenol from wastewater

The current work investigates the phenol adsorption from wastewater using tea fibre waste as an adsorbent. The agricultural waste was treated with phosphoric acid and various properties like surface are, pore volume and average particle size of the adsorbent were determined. The optimization of the parameters like temperature, pH, dosage and concentration were done with response surface methodology (RSM). The quadratic model developed from the optimization was used to relate the variation of percent removal with respect to experimental parameters. The equilibrium data obeyed Freundlich model while kinetic data followed first order model. From the thermodynamic studies, the feasibility of the process was found. The adsorption capacity for the tea fibre was obtained as 12.59 mg/g.