Abstract:
Nowadays, adsorption is recognized as one of the major significant separation processes
amid the physical, biological, and chemical processes.
Activated carbon adsorption has been widely used for the purification of water and
wastewater and for the treatment of numerous environmental problems. In this work,
polyurethane (PU) foam-activated carbon composites were synthesized, by mixing of a number
of well-defined ingredients such as, polyol and toluene diisocyanate, to produce a flexible foam
of alveolar structure after polymerization reactions, and were characterized by several techniques
such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), wettability analysis, Density ( geometric
measurement and measured by the Archimedes principle), Porosity, spectroscopic analysis
(Infrared and Raman) and mechanical analysis (compression - decompression cycle).
The synthesized composite was used to remove crude oil, which is a source of
environmental issues. The prepared monolith enabled the recovery of 96% of sorbed crude oil
from the sorbent material by simple compressive force. This will allow repetitive use of the
spongy material thus prepared, which may be very helpful for local economies. The use of a
model whose validity attained 0.81 helped us avoid tedious and costly experiments, by using the
design of experiments method.
