Adsorption and desorption of binary mixtures of copper and mercury ions on natural and crosslinked chitosan membranes

Copper and mercury ion adsorption on chitosan membranes was investigated in batch systems (with both single and binary solutions). The Langmuir model and its extensions (extended Langmuir, Jain-Snoeyink, and Langmuir-Freundlich models) were tested for the modeling of experimental data. Chitosan membranes presented more affinity for Hg ions than for Cu ions. The decrease of the amount of metal adsorbed on natural chitosan in binary systems (compared to single-metal solutions) showed the competition effects between the two metal ions. For glutaraldehyde-crosslinked chitosan and epichlorohydrin-crosslinked chitosan, the mixture effect was present, producing unexpected result such as higher adsorption capacities, when compared to the monocomponent solution of each metal. The desorption of the metals was also investigated, and copper and mercury ions could be selectively recovered using a combined process by using NaCl and H2SO4 as eluant.