Crosslinked Calcium Alginates Porous Beads for Adsorption Removal of Ammonium Ions

mmonia pollution of natural water can promote adverse undesirable environmental impacts on aquatic fauna, human and environment. Different techniques were elaborated for treatment of this pollution. Recently, polymer hydrogels have been successfully used as adsorbents of ammonium ions. Among the polysaccharides that can be used in the wastewater treatment, the alginates have the ability to adsorb various pollutants in the flexible channels by electrostatic interaction between the NH_4^ + ions in aqueous solution and the –COO – groups of the polymeric network. Alginates are natural biopolymers; they could be obtained from the brown seaweeds, extraction of alginates is often effectuated in a sodium form related to their fast solubility in cold water. In this work, sodium alginate solution was crosslinked by calcium divalent cations in the beads forms. The resulting beads are roughly spherical, when they are swollen; they become bigger in size, they were characterized by several techniques, which revealed that the sample contains different mineral and organic functional groups. Indeed, optimization of the contact time, temperature, pH, initial adsorbate concentration and initial adsorbent concentration has been studied. So, the maximal removal efficiency was 47.72