Hybrid of chitin and humic acid as high performance sorbent for Ni(II)

Sorption of Ni(II) on both chitin and chitin-HA was maximum at pH 8.0. The kinetic expression resulted from the proposed kinetic model has been shown to be more applicable than the commonly known Lagergren equation obtained from the pseudo-first order sorption model. The application of the proposed model revealed that the presence of HA increased the ks from 0.018 min−1 for chitin to 0.031 min−1 for chitin-HA. As for ks, the value of b was also bigger in the presence of HA, i.e. 7.42 × 10−5 mol/g for chitin and 9.93 × 10−5 mol/g for the chitin-HA. Unlike ks and b, the value of E slightly decreased from 23.23 to 21.51 kJ/mol for the absence and presence of HA, respectively. It can also be deduced that the presence of HA on chitin contributed more to the additional layer of Ni(II) sorbed on sorbent. Without HA, B for chitin was only 6.17 times higher than b, while with the presence of HA, the enhancement of the sorption capacity from the multilayer (B) to the monolayer (b) was 19.40. The increase of ks, b, B, and the decrease of E would be very benefit in the real application of chitin-HA for the recovery of Ni(II) from aqueous samples.