Reactivation of spent activated carbon for glycerine purification
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Reactivation of spent activated carbon for glycerine purification Yi‑Thung Khok1 · Chee‑Heong Ooi1 · Akihiko Matsumoto2 · Fei‑Yee Yeoh1,3 Received: 6 September 2019 / Revised: 17 January 2020 / Accepted: 27 January 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Activated carbon (AC) is widely used as an adsorbent for glycerine purification. However, after prolonged usage, adsorption capacity of the resulted spent AC (SAC) reached saturation which affects its adsorption performances. In this work, the adsorption capability of SAC was restored by thermal and chemical reactivations. Chemical reactivation was carried out at room temperature with 10 M NaOH (CRAC10) which showed the best adsorption capability, concluded by its normalised iodine number which was recorded at 904.15 mg/g. Glycerine purification test showed that free fatty acid, carotenoids, chlorophyll and ash content in crude glycerine were effectively reduced by 38.64%, 40%, 64.29% and 84.65%, respectively after the adsorption by CRAC10. The same sample also contributed to the best performance with 45.46% glycerine purification while the adsorbent dosage was optimized at 20 g/l. Keywords Spent activated carbon · Thermal reactivated carbon · Chemical reactivated carbon · NaOH · Glycerine purification
1 Introduction Activated carbon (AC) is an adsorbent that is used widely in various applications for purification, metal extraction, gold recovery (Soleimani and Kaghazchi 2008), water filtration (Huggins et al. 2016) and purification of palm oil and its derivatives which include fatty acid methyl esters and glycerine (Fadhil et al. 2019; Fonseca et al. 2019; Gomes et al. 2015; Santos et al. 2017; Yin et al. 2007). Adsorption by AC is found to be an efficient and economical way to purify crude glycerine due to its low energy consumption and the ability to operate at room temperature (Hunsom and Autthanit 2013). During glycerine purification, impurities in crude glycerine including free fatty acids (FFAs), pigmented compounds (e.g., carotenoids and chlorophyll) and ash were * Fei‑Yee Yeoh [email protected] 1
School of Materials & Mineral Resources Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 14300 Nibong Tebal, Penang, Malaysia
2
Department of Environmental and Life Sciences, Toyohashi University of Technology, Tempaku‑cho, Toyohashi 441‑8580, Japan
3
Titatech Engineering Sdn. Bhd., 1‑18, Lorong Delima 2, Taman Seri Delima, 13700 Bukit Mertajam, Penang, Malaysia
removed to produce pure glycerine (Dhabhai et al. 2016). FFAs are more prone to oxidation and thus they must be adsorbed to maintain the quality of glycerine (Ardi et al. 2015). Carotenoids adsorption can decolourize the glycerine and reduce the risk of colour fixation during deodorization (Silva et al. 2013), while chlorophyll adsorption causes the purified glycerine to become less susceptible to photo-oxidation, and it improves its storage stability (Li et al. 2016). After prolonged usage, AC becomes saturated and can no longer function as an effectiv
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