Oil spill remediation by grafted natural polysaccharide gum tragacanth: its kinetics and isotherms studies

A novel hydrogel was synthesized via grafting of acrylic acid and methylmethacrylate onto natural polysaccharide gum tragacanth using ammonium persulphate-glutaraldehyde as initiator-crosslinker system. The potential of synthesized hydrogel for the adsorption of crude oil from aqueous solution was investigated in the present work. Explorations were carried out to find out the effects of parametric variation of adsorbent dosage, contact time, adsorbate, pH, agitation speed and temperature on the adsorption of crude oil. The optimized parameters for the attainment of the maximum oil adsorption were temperature 40 degrees C, pH 3, time 80 min, adsorbate concentration 0.03 g/L and adsorbent conc. 3g. The synthesized hydrogel was characterized by FTIR, thermo-gravimetric analysis/DTA/differential thermogravimetric analysis, SEM micrographs and XRD analysis. Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption isotherm models were utilized to illustrate the experimental isotherms and isotherms constants. Equilibrium data were found to fit very well with Langmuir models. Intraparticle diffusion model provides the best correlation of the adsorption mechanism for this experiment. The results showed that synthesized hydrogel has very high affinity for the adsorption of crude oil, and it was convincingly efficient for the adsorption of crude oil.