Assessment of Dispersed Oil Sorption in Oily Wastewater onto Hydrophobized/Oleophilized Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC) Grains

Abstract

The discharge of untreated oily wastewater into the environment has serious impacts on human health, living nature, and ecosystems and leads to significant economic losses. Many engineering techniques have been proposed and applied to treat oily wastewater, but limited studies have investigated low-cost and effective techniques using by-products and waste/scrap materials from the construction industry. Materials to treat oily wastewater are needed not only to mitigate environmental pollution but also to promote the reuse and recycling of industrial by-products, especially in developing countries. This study, therefore, examined the sorption capacity of dispersed oil in wastewater (dispersed soybean oil in water; initial oil concentrations, Ci = 10–1000 mg/L; oil droplet size in water 80% in high oil concentration solutions (Ci = 100 and 1000 mg/L), indicating that the hydrophobized/oleophilized AAC grains have high potential as useful adsorbents to trap dispersed oil in oily wastewater. Moreover, adsorption isotherms were drawn to examine the sorption characteristics of dispersed oil onto AAC grains. For all tested samples, the sorption of dispersed oil increased linearly with increasing equilibrium concentration. The commonly used Langmuir model, on the other hand, did not capture the measured isotherms.

Keywords

• dispersed oil
• oily wastewater
• autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC)
• sorption
• Vietnam