Bentonitic clay and wood sawdust are natural materials widely available in nature at low cost with high heavy metals sorption properties that, in this work, were combined to achieve an effective ...composite biosorbent with high sorption properties and enhanced mechanical stability. Pine, aspen, and birch wood sawdust, as well as different bentonite clays and different sawdust modification methods (H
PO
or HCl) were used for preparing new composite biosorbents. A mixture of wood sawdust and bentonite in a ratio of 2:1 was used. All materials were characterized by using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and scanning electron microscope (SEM) methods and tested for Cu and Ni ions removal from water. The adsorption process for all composite biosorbents was well described from a pseudo-second order kinetic model (R
> 0.9999) with a very high initial adsorption rate of Cu and Ni ions and a maximum uptake recorded within 2 h. The results have shown that the adsorption capacity depends mainly on the kind of wood and the acid treatment of the wood that enhances the adsorption capacity. At a concentration of 50 mg/L, the biosorbent prepared using birch wood sawdust showed the worst performance, removing barely 30% of Cu and Ni ions, while aspen wood sawdust improved the adsorption of Cu (88.6%) and Ni (52.4%) ions. Finally, composite biosorbent with pine wood sawdust showed the best adsorption be haviour with an efficiency removal of 98.2 and 96.3% of Cu and Ni ions, respectively, making it a good candidate as an inexpensive and effective biosorbent for the removal of heavy metals.
The development of an algorithm to automate the process of measuring the magnetic properties of macroscopic objects in motion is an important problem in various industries, especially in ferrous ...metallurgy and at factories where ferrous scrap is a strategic raw material. The parameter that requires work control is the hidden mass fraction of a non-magnetic substance that is present in the ferromagnetic raw material. The solution to this problem has no prototypes. In our work, a simple measuring device and a mathematical algorithm for calculating the mass fraction of the non-magnetic fraction in a strongly magnetic matrix were developed. The device is an inductance coil, in which the angle of the electromagnet losses is related to the mass of the magnetic material moving the coil. The magnitude of the instantaneous values of the lost angle integral was compared with the result of weighing the object on scales. This allowed us to calculate the proportion of the magnetic and non-magnetic fractions. The use of this prototype is herein illustrated. The experimental results of the determination of the magnetic-fractional composition depending on the mass of scrap metal and its bulk and the magnetic characteristics are presented.
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