Biossorção de íons metálicos presentes nas águas de efluentes de indústrias químicas.

Abstract

The industrial activities have introduced metals in waters in quantities which are greater than those found naturally, thereby causing heavy pollutions. The conventional treatments (chemical reduction, ionic exchange, ultrafiltration and inverse osmosis), normally used for the metal removal of the liquid effluents, present some disadvantages, because majority of them apart from being expensive processes are not capable to remove metal ions compleatly. The necessity of efficient and economic treatments for removal of metallic ions from effluents has resulted in the development of new technologies. Many of these techniques are based on the use of bacteria, fungi, microseaweed, and macroseaweed. The biosorption is a process in which solids of natural origin or its derivatives are used in the retention of metallic ions from an aqueous medium. The biosorption process has as main advantages the low operational cost and high selectivity when compared to the conventional methods for the removal of metallic ions from industrial effluents. Amongst the used microorganisms fungi are more distinguished, as these are used in a variety of industrial processes and serves as constant and economic source of supplement of biomass for removal of metallic ions. Brazil being a world-wide big producer of ethyl alcohol by a fermentative process that uses the Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ferment) as the microorganism, it is a common practice in the industries of alcohol to remove the excess of the ferment cream by centrifuging. This way, the excessive Saccharomyces cerevisiae of the fermentation process is a source that can be used, for example, as biosorbent of metallic íons for the decontamination of environment. Experiments of biosorption of metallic íons using the Saccharomyces cerevisiae for removal of the Cd2+ and Pb2+ had been carried out to investigate the factors that influence and optimize the biosorption process. Through the study of the static kinetics it was verified that a period of 48 hours is enough for the process to reach the equilibrium. For the dynamic kinetics after 90 min no more change in the final concentration of the two metallic ions occurred. Therefore, this time is enough for the system to reach the equilibrium when the process is operating in dynamic conditions. The design of experiment technique was used to evaluate the effect of the variables: biomass amount, metallic ions concentrations, temperature, pH and state of the biomass (alive or dead). The effects of the amount of biomass amount and initial metallic ion concentration were the variables that presented more significant effects when compared with the effect of pH and state of the biomass (alive or dead) under the evaluated conditions. The Langmuir and Freundlich models were used to adjust to the experimental data of the adsorption isotherms of metal ions studied. The model that adjusted better the adsorption isotherms was of Langmuir having qmax values as 210.5 mg.g-1 for cadmium and 1486.88 mg.g-1 (Langmuir not linearized) for the lead. The immobilized ferment presented a decrease in its efficiency of metal ion removal. In the study for the immobilized ferment an average efficiency of the adsorbed amount per unit of mass of 78.5% for the Cd2+ and 73.92% for the Pb2+ was observed.