Pretreatment of coking wastewater by an adsorption process using fine coking coal

A new technique for pretreatment of coking wastewater is introduced based on the concept of circular economy. Coal is fed into a coking system after adsorption. This study validates the feasibility of using coking coal to adsorb organic pollutants in coking wastewater. The sorption kinetics and equilibrium sorption isotherms of coking coal for removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and phenol from coking wastewater was also discussed in this paper. Gas chromatograph/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS) was used to detect changes in the quality of coking wastewater. The results showed that when coking coal dosage was 120 g/dm3, 65% of COD and 34% of phenol in waste water can be removed after 40 min of agitation. The surface functional groups of coking coal before and after adsorption were observed with a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. The kinetics of COD and phenol adsorption from coking wastewater by coking coal fitted the pseudo second-order model. The adsorption process of coking coal can be classified into two categories, namely, rapid and slow. The Freundlich isotherm provided a better fit with all adsorption isotherms than the Langmuir isotherm. Coking coal could be a suitable low-cost adsorbent for recalcitrant organic pollutants.