The kinetics of adsorption of tetracycline on chitosan particles

Experiments to monitor and characterize the kinetics of adsorption of tetracycline on chitosan particles are reported in this work. The same pseudo-order kinetics that has been widely used for describing the adsorption in systems related to wastewater purification and drug loading was used to treat the present data. As some unexpected results came out from the experiments, it was necessary a detailed deduction for this sort of kinetics to be carried out, so that approximations related to short and long times were obtained. Firstly it was shown that an apparently linear t/q(t) versus t relationship did not imply a pseudo-second-order sorption kinetics, differently of what has been repeatedly reported in the literature. It was found that this misinterpretation could be avoided by using non-linear regression. Finally, the adsorption of tetracycline on chitosan particles was analyzed, using the insights obtained from theoretical analysis, and the parameters generated were used to analyze to adsorption kinetics and to propose an adsorption mechanism.