Selective separation of lead ions from waste water by immobilized Chlorella based biosorbents

In the present investigation, a unicellular green algae Chlorella pyrenoidosa (cultured in laboratory) has been immobilized on a stationary support (silica gel),invoking an ion-exchange approach of “Donnan equilibrium concept” , to obtained biosorbents called as “AlgaSORBs” of the required stability and selectivity. The performance of prepared biosorbents towards the selective separation and preconcentration of a few important trace metals,viz.,Zn +2 ,Cu 2+ , Cd 2+ , and Pb 2+ from multi elemental system was studied with synthetic water samples. The inherent surge of interest in the present investigation was also underlying in the search for low capacity biosorbents which could be used as packing material in the single column ion-chromatography. The biosorptive evaluation of heavy metals is performed under both static (batch) and dynamic (column) conditions. These biosorbents were found selective for Pb 2+ ions from multi elemental samples at pH 6.9 and flow rate 1.5 ml/min.