Synergic adsorption performance of activated carbon prepared from Chinese prickly ash seeds

Waste residue of Chinese prickly ash seeds were simply treated with aqueous ZnCl₂ to prepared the high-performed activated carbon. It was characterized by the methods of XRD, SEM, EDX, FT-IR, BET and XPS. The synergetic adsorption performance of Chinese prickly ash seeds activated carbon for Pb²⁺, Ni²⁺ and Acid Orange IΙ (AO) was studied. In the single-component system, the adsorption capacity of Pb²⁺, Ni²⁺ and AO were 15.1, 10.7 and 188.4 mg/g, respectively. In the AO-Pb²⁺ system, the maximum adsorption capacity of Pb²⁺ and AO were 79.40 and 332.68 mg/g under temperature of 30°C and pH of 5.0, respectively. For AO-Ni²⁺ system, it was 375.6 and 38.3 mg/g, respectively. The adsorption kinetics was satisfactorily fitted by the pseudo-second-order model. The synergic adsorption process can be smoothly described by the non-modified Sips isotherm.