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

Hybrid of humic acid (HA) and chitin has been synthesized and the hybrid material (chitin-HA) was then applied as sorbent to adsorb Ni(II). The HA was extracted from peat soil of Gambut District, South Kalimantan, Indonesia, according to the procedure recommended by IHSS (International Humic Substances Society). The chitin was isolated from crab shell waste of sea food restaurants through deproteination using NaOH 3.5% (w/v) and followed by removal of inorganic impurities using HCl 1 M. The synthesis of chitin-HA was performed by reacting gelatinous chitin solution in HCl 0.5 M and HA solution in NaOH 0.5 M. Parameters investigated in this work consists of effect of medium acidity on the sorption, sorption rate (k_s) and desorption rate (k_d) constants, Langmuir (monolayer) and Freundlich (multilayer) sorption capacities, and energy (E) of sorption. The k_s and k_d were determined according to a kinetic model of first order sorption reaching equilibrium, monolayer sorption capacity (b) and energy (E) were determined according to the Langmuir isotherm model, and multilayer sorption capacity (B) was determined based on the Freundlich isotherm model.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 k_s from 0.018 min⁻¹ for chitin to 0.031 min⁻¹ for chitin-HA. As for k_s, 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 k_s 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 k_s, 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.