Removal of Major Pollutants from Petroleum Wastewater by Adsorption with Activated Carbon Derived from Date Seed in an Inverse Fluidized Bed

The present paper deals with the determination of pollutant removal efficiency of date pit-activated carbon (DPAC) from petroleum industry wastewater in a continuously operating inverse fluidized bed (IFB). The effect of physical and operating parameters of the adsorption process on total organic carbon (TOC), biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) of the petroleum wastewater were investigated through rigorous experimentation (184 data sets). The pollutant removal efficiency was found to be highly satisfactory with more than 95% reduction in COD, BOD and more than 88% reduction in TOC achieved under optimum condition within 160 min of wastewater circulation time through inverse fluidized DPAC bed. Three empirical correlations for percentage reductions of TOC, BOD and COD as a function of eight different physical and operating parameters were developed by dimensional analysis and the exponents were evaluated using 92 assorted experimental data and validated by the residual 92 data. The empirical equations developed were found to be well applicable within the range of dimensionless parameters \({Ar}_{m}\), \({Re}_{p}\), (\({\rho }_{l}/{(\rho }_{l}-{\rho }_{p}))\) and the dimensionless bed height of 1.663 to 55.4211, 0.1089 to 2.8181, 3.8644 to 4.3137 and 25.423 to 36.0169, respectively.