Removal of rhodamine 6G and crystal violet dyes from water sample using cellulose acetate-(3-aminopropyl)-triethoxysilane sorbent

In this work, cellulose acetate-(3-aminopropyl)triethoxysilane (CA-APTES) was evaluated for the first time as adsorbent for the removal of rhodamine 6G (R6G) and crystal violet (CV) in water. The sorbent was first synthesized then characterized using attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR). The presence of C=O amide at 1740.17 cm^-1 and N-H amide around 3451.98 cm^-1 confirmed that the sorbent has been successfully synthesized. The removal efficiency was determined using ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectrophotometry, where the optimum conditions were found to be at 2 ppm initial dyes concentration, sample solution of pH 7, 50 mg of sorbent, and 2 hours of shaking time. Kinetic studies for the sorbents were carried out using both pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order models, where the R² values for removal R6G and CV were 0.0064 and 0.0523 respectively for the former, and R² 0.75 and 0.87 respectively for the latter. The kinetic study was best described using pseudo-second-order model. The optimized method was adopted for the dyes removal in real batik textile wastewater, whereby removal efficiencies of 61.81 % for CV and 48.62 % for R6G were obtained.