Chemists from Belgorod State University developed a new method to treat wastewater

The research on development and production of a new sorbent meeting the global trends in greening, was conducted under the program of the Scientific and Research Centre “Innovative Solutions in Agribusiness” in collaboration with young scientists from the University of Zuytan in Vietnam. The author of the idea is Le Van Thuan, a BelSU alumni and doctoral student, who is currently working at Zuytan University.

Olga Lebedeva, the Head of BelSU Department of General Chemistry, noted that the activated carbon of various kinds is widely used as a sorbent, but the current obtaining methods are energy-consuming, expensive, and detrimental to the environmental because of the use of a number of toxic chemical compounds and aggressive acid.

When making the carbon sorbent based on the technology developed by the university’s chemists, no pollution-causing waste is produced. Le Van Thuan explains it, first of all, by the fact that dried fruits and fruit stones from agricultural waste with a rounded shape of 2-10 mm in diameter are used as a plant material in the sorbent production.

“The samples testing allowed us to determine that the absorption efficiency ranged from 92.8% to 99.8% compared to 50.3% to 62.2% for a sorbent made without a special activator”, said Le Van Thuan.

Using an activation process involving soluble carbonic acid salts, drying and carbonization, scientists have succeeded in producing a sorbent which has a high specific surface area and a total pore volume about three times that of a sorbent produced without the use of the activator.