Vanadium removal by metal (hydr)oxide adsorbents

Vanadium is listed on the United States Environment Protection Agency (USEPA) candidate contaminant list # 2 (CCL2), and regulatory guidelines for vanadium exist in some US states. The USEPA requires treatability studies before making regulatory decisions on CCL2 contaminants. Previous studies have examined vanadium adsorption onto some metal hydroxides but not onto commercially available adsorbents. This paper briefly summarizes known vanadium occurrence in North American groundwater and assesses vanadium removal by three commercially available metal oxide adsorbents with different mineralogies. GTO (Dow) is TiO2 based and E-33 (Seven Trents) and GFH (US Filter) are iron based. Preliminary vanadate adsorption kinetics onto GFH, E-33 and GTO has been studied and the homogenous surface diffusion model (HSDM) is used to describe the adsorption kinetics data. The effects of pH, vanadium concentration, and volume/mass ratio are assessed. Vanadium adsorption decreases with increasing pH, with maximum adsorption capacities achieved in at pH 3–4. Results indicate that all adsorbents remove vanadium; GFH has the highest adsorption capacity, followed by GTO and E-33. Data are best fit with the Langmuir model rather than Freundlich isotherms. Both the sorption maxima (Xm) and binding energy constant (b) follow the trend GFH>GTO>E-33. Naturally occurring vanadium is also removed from Arizona ground water in rapid small-scale column tests (RSSCTs). Metal oxide adsorption technologies currently used for arsenic removal may also remove vanadium but not always with the same effectiveness.