Elimination d’un médicament par un biosorbant naturel

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to study the removal of two types of pollutants originating from commonly used pharmaceutical products: ferric iron, found in Seloferfol tablets, and the azo dye azorubine (E122), present in Salbutamol Saidal syrup. To achieve this, activated carbons were prepared from orange and lemon peels and used as natural adsorbents. The efficiency of these biomaterials was assessed through a series of experiments by varying several operational parameters such as pH, contact time, and adsorbent mass. The adsorption mechanisms were investigated by applying two kinetic models: pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order. The latter proved to be the most suitable for describing the experimental data, suggesting that the adsorption process is primarily governed by chemical interactions. Furthermore, the Langmuir, Freundlich, and Temkin isotherms were employed to model the adsorption equilibrium. The results demonstrated very high removal rates: up to 99.304% for ferric iron using lemon peel- based activated carbon, and 97.631% using orange peel-based carbon. As for azorubine, the removal efficiencies reached 94.25% with orange peel carbon and 93.388% with lemon peel carbon. These findings highlight the excellent adsorption capacity of both biomaterials, with a slight advantage for lemon peel carbon in the case of ferric iron, and orange peel carbon for azorubine.