Adsorption of textile dyes on raw and decanted Moroccan clays: Kinetics, equilibrium and thermodynamics

Inexpensive and easily available Moroccan natural clays were investigated for the removal availability of textile dyes from aqueous solution. For this purpose, the adsorption of methylene blue (MB) as reference molecule, malachite green (MG) representative of cationic dyes and methyl orange (MO) representative of anionic dyes, was studied in batch mode under various parameters. The clays were characterized by means of XRD, cationic exchange capacity and BET surface area analysis. The experimental results show that, the adsorption was pH dependent with a high adsorption capacity of MB and MG in basic range and high adsorption of MO in acidic range. The pseudo-second-order kinetic model provided the best fit to the experimental data for the adsorption of MB and MG by the clays. However, the adsorption of MO was more suitable to be controlled by an intra-particle diffusion mechanism. The equilibrium adsorption data were analyzed by Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin–Radushkevich isotherm models. The adsorption process was found to be exothermic in nature in the case of MB and MO. However, the adsorption of MG was endothermic.