Mitigation of oil spills from synthetic seawater using human hair – Experimentation, modeling and optimization

Oil spills are considered to be one of the worst catastrophes that occur in the marine environment and it is obligatory to remediate oil spills. The preset paper focuses on the adsorptive removal of oil spills from synthetic water using human hair, a potent natural adsorbent. Diesel was used as a representative of the spilled oils. Both batch and column studies were conducted and the maximum adsorptive capacity of hair was found to be 4.95 g/g. About 100% removal efficiency was obtained in column studies at 9 cm bed height with initial concentrations up to 20% (v/v). Equilibrium data were fitted to the Freundlich isotherm model and it was found that adsorption obeys the pseudo-second-order kinetic model. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) were employed for the modelling and optimization of the process. The adsorbent dose of 2.52 g with 13.45 min of contact time was found to be optimum to achieve maximum removal efficiency for batch study and 8.85 cm of bed height, 179.51 mL/h flow rate, and 15% of initial concentration were obtained as optimized values of column studies. The present study reinforces the utilization of human hair for the remediation of oil spills.