Elimination of lead by electro-kinetic method from the contaminated soils

Abstract

In this study, an electro-kinetic method applied for the purpose of eliminating lead from contaminated soil (sandy), and this technology is applicable in low permeable soils. Many sets of experiments conducted with different enhancedconditions, including different electrode purging solutions, voltage gradient. Bitter orange peels (BOP) was used as a low cost adsorbent material to prevent reverse osmosis flow, which may affect the removal efficiency. The results showed that the removal efficiency increase with decrease in pH of the purging solutions, three tests were conducted using purging solution at pH 4.5, 6 and 7.5 respectively, the best removal efficiency was 85.16%at pH=4 comparison with other two tests at pH 6 and 7.5, where the removal efficiencies were 80.32% and 72.4%, respectively. The experiments proved that the pb removal from the soil increased when voltage gradient increased, where the removal efficiency at 1.5 V/cm was 85.16% comparison with the test at 1 V/cm, where the removal efficiency was 82.1%. This study proved that the (BOP) is a good adsorbent material to prevent the reverse electro-osmotic flow, and hence it could be considered economically and beneficially as a good adsorbent medium.