Competitive Adsorption of Phenols on Activated Carbon

Abstract

The adsorption of phenol and substituted phenols on activated carbon was examined. Mixtures of phenolic compounds were employed to test the Ideal Adsorbed Solution (IAS) theory using an improved method of calculation that had been developed for the description of multi‐component adsorption. This improved method of calculation allows for equilibrium concentrations to be calculated independent of the experimental observations as previously required in the original work. The IAS model with the modified calculation method was tested for its performance on ten sets of binary and tenary phenolic mixtures. The Langmuir competitive model was used for comparison. The IAS model was found to be successful in precisely describing the competitive adsorption behavior of phenolic mixtures and was proven to be superior to the Langmuir competitive model in all cases studied. The IAS model was also found to be relatively sensitive to the single‐component isotherm parameters input to the model calculation, particularly at low adsorbate concentration.