Process development for the removal of toxic metals by functionalized wood pulp: kinetic, thermodynamic, and computational modeling approach

A new composite, itaconic acid grafted poly(vinyl) alcohol encapsulated wood pulp (IA-g-PVA-en-WP) was prepared and used for heavy metal removal [11.63 mg g−1; 93.03 % for Cd(II), 11.90 mg g−1; 95.18 % for Pb(II), and 12.14 mg g−1; 97.08 % for Ni(II)] by batch biosorption equilibrium technique. Morphological and textural features of the product were studied using SEM and BET analysis. The biosorption kinetics and thermodynamic analysis were studied for all the system to determine intraparticle and boundary layer diffusion as the rate determining steps and feasible, spontaneous and exothermic nature of biosorption at 298–318 K. The preciseness of kinetic models to experimental equilibrium data was checked by error analysis. A multilayer feed forward artificial neural network model with 15 hidden neurons at 1500 epochs was developed to predict the biosorption efficiency of the biomaterial. This model was found to be operating adequately with good correlation [R 2 = 0.997, 0.998, and 0.995 for Cd(II), Pb(II) and Ni(II)] and minimum mean square error demonstrating its good generalization potential. These findings provide an intriguing approach for the development of pre-treatment process for heavy metal decontamination from wastewater at a reduced cost.