Detachment of Cu (II) and Co (II) ions from synthetic wastewater via adsorption on Lates niloticus fish bones using LIBS and XRF.

Natural fish bones, that are known to have unique adsorption capacity, have been used in the present work for removal of heavy metals, copper, and cobalt, from wastewater. It has been found that sorption process depends on the initial metal concentration and on the contact time. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) as a spectrochemical analytical technique was used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of the water samples. X-ray Fluorescence (XRF), as another spectrochemical analytical method, was exploited to characterize the remediation of wastewater. The optimum contact time values for the removal of Cu (II) and Co (II) were 270 and 300 min, respectively. Furthermore, the percentages of adsorbed Cu (II) and Co (II) were high for low initial concentrations and decreased with increasing the heavy metal initial concentrations. The Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models were used to analyze the equilibrium adsorption data and Freundlich isotherm was found to represent the experimental results well with a correlation factor close to one. However, the pseudo-second-order kinetic model provided the best fit to the experimental data for the adsorption of heavy metals using fish bones compared to the pseudo-first-order model. The obtained results demonstrate the potential of using both LIBS and XRF in the analysis of contaminant wastewater effectively.