Preparation of sewage sludge based activated carbon by using Fenton’s reagent and their use in 2-Naphthol adsorption

In this study, Fenton’s reagents (H2O2/Fe2+) are used to activate raw sewage sludge for the preparation of the sludge based activated carbon. The effect of the amount of hydrogen peroxide addition on carbon’s chemical composition, texture properties, surface chemistry and morphology are investigated. Choosing an appropriate H2O2 dosage (5 v%) (equivalent to 70.7 mM/(g VS)), it is possible to obtain a comparatively highly porous materials with SBET and the total pore volume being 321 m2/g and 0.414 cm3/g, respectively. Continuously increasing the oxidant ratio resulted in a decreased SBET value. Further adsorption experiments by using 2-naphthol as model pollutant revealed that the adoption followed a pseudo-second-order kinetics better than pseudo-first-order. The calculated adsorption capacity is 111.9 mg/g on the carbon with 5% H2O2 pretreatment while this value is just 51.5 mg/g on carbons without any pretreatment.