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Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON WATER RESOURCES, COASTAL AND OCEAN

ENGINEERING (ICWRCOE 2015)

Rice Husk and Sugarcane Baggase Based Activated Carbon for Iron
and Manganese Removal
Chitaranjan Dalaia*, Ramakar Jhab , V.R. Desaic
a
IIT Kharagpur,West Bengal, India.
b
Department of Civil Engineering, NIT Rourkela, Odisha,India.
c
Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Kharagpur,West Bengal, India.

Abstract

Iron and manganese are commonly present in groundwater supplies used by many water systems. The presence of
iron and manganese in the drinking water is not harmful to human bodies. However, higher concentration causes
discoloration, staining, turbidity and bad taste problems. It also form iron oxide or manganese dioxide
accumulations in pipes.
In the present work, low cost methods have been evolved for the removal of iron and manganese from ground water
using Rice Husk based Activated Carbon (RHAC) and Sugarcane Baggase based Activated Carbon (SBAC).
Exhaustive experiments have been conducted in the Laboratory on sediment columns with variable depths of 10, 20,
30, 40, and 50 cm. Four graded types of sediment collected from the banks of Rivers Brahmani, Koel, Sankha and
Budhabalanga were studied for proper removal of suspended solids by maintaining sufficient infiltration rates. It has
been observed that the infiltration rate is maintained for the soil column of 50 cm without having any impact of the
suspended solids. The Iron and manganese concentrations are found to be removed 100% after passing through the
filter material in both the cases.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of ICWRCOE 2015.
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of ICWRCOE 2015
Keywords: Water treatment; Drinking water; Activated Carbon; iron and manganese removal

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: chittaranjan_2009@yahoo.com

2214-241X © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of ICWRCOE 2015
doi:10.1016/j.aqpro.2015.02.143
 Chitaranjan Dalai et al. / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133 1127

1. Introduction

Groundwater resources play a vital role in the generation of clean and satisfactory drinking water supply all around
the world. In European countries, like Denmark, Austria and Iceland, more than 95 percent of their water supplies
originate from groundwater reservoirs (NGU, 2008). In Asia, groundwater is also used extensively for their water
supplies e.g. 80 percent in (rural) India, 80 percent in Maldives and more than 60 percent of water supply in
Philippines and Nepal originates from groundwater resources (Das Gupta, 1991 cited in (Sharma, 2001). The
groundwater is being used for water supply at large scale (UNESCO, 2004).

Groundwater contamination has significant complications on nature and can pose serious threat to human health.
Iron and manganese being the fourth most abundant element and second most abundant metal in the earth's crust
(Silver 1993; WHO 1996; Tredoux et al., 2004; Ebermann et al., 2010), is a common constituent of groundwater.
The presence of iron in groundwater is generally attributed to the dissolution of iron bearing rocks and minerals,
mainly oxides (hematite, magnetite, and limonite), sulphides, carbonates and silicates under anaerobic conditions in
the presence of reducing agents like organic matter and hydrogen sulphide (O'Connor 1971; Hem 1989).

Iron in groundwater is a major quality concern in many rural areas where hand pumps and deep wells are used.
People facing problems of the bitter taste and the colour of the water. Hand pumps and tube wells frequently fail to
provide the required service due to clogging by iron deposits.

Drinking water supplies are focused ground water resources everywhere all over the world. At few localities areas
problems with higher concentrations of iron and manganese found in ground water. Therefore World Health
Organization has approved the treatment of water if concentrations of iron and manganese are higher than 0.3mg/L
and 0.1 mg/L. Several techniques have been applied to remove iron and manganese from groundwater.

Attempts have been made to solve the problem in some areas by installing low-cost iron removal units promoted by
UNICEF (UNICEF 1986). However, they are very few in number and the majority of them does not work properly
or are not being used as a result of various operational problems.

Commercially available activated carbons like granular activated carbon (Calgon crop. Pittsburgh, PA) (Mollah et
al., 1996, Robinson et al., 1996) and Khan et al., 1997), GAC (Sotelo et al., 2002) are used as potable water
treatment. But it is expensive and the regeneration costs is high. Hence this had led many workers to search for more
economic, practical and efficient adsorbents. Bituminous coal (Moreno et al., 1995), pine bark (Edgehill et al.,
1998), red mud (Namasivayam et al.,1998), fly ash (Kumar et al., 1987) straw , coconut shell, wood, tyre (Steal et
al., 1995) etc are some new adsorbents used for removal of phenols. Catalytic degradation of chlorophenol has also
been investigated (Liu et al., 2001).

In the present work, focus has been made to fulfil the following objectives:
I. To use different sediment samples collected from river banks, estimate their physical properties and
infiltration rate for sustainability, if polluted water with suspended material is flow through it.
II. To use low cost filter material a different depths in soil column for removal of iron and manganese.

Nomenclature

RHAC Rice Husk based Activated Carbon

SBAC Sugarcane Baggase based Activated Carbon
1128 Chitaranjan Dalai et al. / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133

2. EXPERIMENTATION

2.1. Preparation of activated carbon

The procedure followed to prepare activated carbon are as follows:

x Rice husk and Sugarcane Baggase was collected from nearby industries, and market, which is almost
free of cost.
x It was dried in sunlight for one day to remove moisture and make it completely dry.
x The dried materials powder was sieved to 250-500 μm size and then carbonization at 7000 c for 1hr
using a muffle furnace under closed conditions (without oxygen).
x The carbonized material was taken out, Sieved to 250-500 μm size again and used for adsorption
studies.
x To improve textural parameters of carbons obtained from rice husk, 100g of carbonized rice husk was
soaked in 0.6ml of citric acid for 2 hr at 200c.
x Now, the acidic rice husk slurry was dried overnight at 500c and then dried heated to 1200 c under
aerobic conditions.
x The prepared activated carob was washed repeatedly with distilled water (20mi/g) to remove surface
acid deposits, if any.
x Finally the cleaned rice husk is oven dried overnight at 1000c to obtain granular activated carbon.
x Granular activated carbon of bulk density 40 g/100 ml was ground and sieved to various fractions of
particle range 0.125–0.150 mm, 0.710–0.850 mm, 1–2 mm, 2–4 mm and 4–5 mm with the help of
standard sieves.
x All the ground materials of various particle sizes were washed by water and dried at 1050 C till the
constant weight was observed.
x Hundred grams of the dried material of each fraction was treated with 240 ml of ferric chloride solution
containing 2.5% Fe3+, the pH was raised to 12 by the addition of 1N NaOH solution.
x After carrying out different processes, the activated carbon made by rice hush is ready for use.
x Similarly, the activated carbon from sugarcane baggase has been prepared.

2.2. Testing of physical properties of sand collected from different river Banks

Soil samples were collected from four sites of Rivers Brahmani, Koel, Sankha and Budhabalanga. The methods
used for obtaining different physical properties obtained are as follows:

x Bulk density was measured by a Picnometer .

x Elemental analysis of the RHAC and SBAC was carried out by an elemental analyzer system (Elementar
Analysensysteme GmbH, model Vario-EL V3.00).
x Surface area and micro pore volume of the samples were measured by N2 adsorption Isotherm using an
ASAP 2010 Micromeritics instrument by Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method. Nitrogen was used as
cold bath.
x SEM photograph was taken by an electron microscope (LEO Electron Microscopy Ltd.).
x X-ray diffraction pattern was taken from a Cu target X-ray diffractometer with 2θ = 5–100佰.

2.3. Testing of chemical properties of water samples

The chemical properties of water samples were tested using the following equipments and standard methods
(APHA, 2007):
 Chitaranjan Dalai et al. / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133 1129

x pH was obtained in-situ using field based pH-meter.

x Dissolved oxygen was observed in the laboratory using DO-meter, and turbidity is observed using
spectrophotometer.
x Total ferrous irons were determined by the phenanthroline method, with the addition of sodium meta-bi-
sulfite was used to obtain total iron using Spectrophotometer.
x Total and dissolved manganese were determined by the PAN Hach method. For dissolved manganese
the samples were filtered by 0.45 mm membrane using Spectrophotometer.

2.4. Experimental set-up

In the laboratory of the Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela an
apparatus was fabricated (Figure 1). The experimental apparatus, made of fibre glass, is having 30 cm length, 8 cm
internal diameter and 10 cm Outer diameter. The apparatus has a provision of withdrawing water from the bottom or
from different depths as shown in figure. It is very useful for carrying out the infiltration tests and pressure analysis.

Figure 1: Fabricated of cylindrical filter

3. Results and Discussion

Once the Rice Husk based Activated Carbon (RHAC) and Sugarcane Baggase based Activated Carbon (SBAC)
were prepared, the experiments started and the results were obtained. The following steps were followed prior to the
start of experiments:

1. Before starting the experiment, the test solutions are prepared. It contains 100 mg/l of iron and 100 mg/l
manganese solution. This solution is considered as pollutant having high iron and manganese
concentrations.

2. A total of 240 sets of experiments were carried out for both the type of activated carbon. The steps
followed are as given below:
1130 Chitaranjan Dalai et al. / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133

(a) Four types of sediment obtained from the banks of Rivers Brahmani, Koel, Sankha and Budhabalanga
were used after studying their physical properties.

(b) Five set of sediment columns with variable depths of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 cm were used to obtain the
column showing high and constant infiltration rate throughout the experiment.

(c) Two types of activated carbon (RHAC and SBAC) were used for the analysis (Figure 2).

(d) Two types of water quality variables namely iron and manganese were tested for their removal using
filter material.

(e) Each activated carbon was place at three locations (top, centre and bottom) (Figure 3).

Figure 2: SEM of RHAC and SBAC: (a) before adsorption RHAC at a magnification of 1.5 k, (b) after adsorption RHAC at a magnification of
1.5 k, (c) before adsorption SBAC at a magnification of 1.5 k and (d) after adsorption SBAC at a magnification of 1.5 k, particle size of each one
was 0.125–0.150 mm

Top 1c.m AC (39 g)

Center 1c.m AC (39 g)

Bottom 1c.m AC (39 g)

Figure 3: Position of RHAC and SBAC at different layers

 Chitaranjan Dalai et al. / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133 1131

3.1. Properties of RHAC and SBAC

Table 1 provides the physical properties of Rice Husk based Activated Carbon (RHAC) and Sugarcane Baggase
based Activated Carbon (SBAC) using various methods.

Table 1: Properties of RHAC and SBAC

Adsorbent Particle Proximate Analysis Surface Micropore Bulk density

Size (mm) (%) Area Vol. (cm3/g) (g/l)
(m2/g)

RHAC 0.125-0.150 Ash:2.58,Moisture:9.71 949.32 0.3316 756.27

SBAC 0.125-0.150 Ash:2.93,Moisture:8.85 771.24 0.2746 822.51

3.2 Iron and Manganese removal

For the experiments the following results are obtained:

1. The rate of infiltration is highest for Budhabalanga river soil sample for soil depth of 50 cm. However,
for the same depth, the soil samples of Koel and Brahmani river also had constant infiltration rate
(Figure 4). The soil samples of Sankha river site provided worst results and were not considered for
further analysis.

Figure 4: Infiltration rate of soil samples

2. By placing the filter material at the centre, the iron and manganese removal was found to be highest
(100%). Similar results are obtained for both types of activated carbon material (Figures 5 and 6).
3. It has been observed the filter material removes water impurity even if it is place on the top or bottom of
the soil column.
1132 Chitaranjan Dalai et al. / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133

Figure 5: Iron removal in RHAC (1 cm depth = 39 g) Different Layers

Figure 6: Iron removal in SBAC (1 cm depth = 33.2 g) Different Layers

4. Conclusions

The following conclusions are drawn:

1. The rate of infiltration is highest for Budhabalanga river soil sample for soil depth of 50 cm. This
indicates that prior to carry out any experiment, the infiltration rate should be studied.
2. Two types of low cost activated carbons (RHAC and SBAC) were used for the analysis and both
provided good results, when place at the centre of the soil column.
3. Further improvements in low cost technologies required so that it can be used as commercial filters by
poor and common people.
 Chitaranjan Dalai et al. / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 1126 – 1133 1133

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