The effect of the presence of metatartaric acid on removal effectiveness of heavy metal ions on chelating ion exchangers.

The paper presents experimental results and their evaluation for the sorption of copper(II), zinc(II), cobalt(II) and nickel(II) complexes with metatartaric acid on chelating ion exchangers with different functional groups. The literature lacks the data concerning sorption of heavy metal ions in the presence of metatartaric acid on ion exchangers. The effect of important parameters such as the value of pH, the metal(II) ion and ligand concentration as well as their molar ratio and the type of functional group of the ion exchanger used was studied. It was found that the time of 60 min was sufficient for sorption to attain equilibrium. The equilibrium sorption capacities for copper(II), zinc(II), cobalt(II) and nickel(II) complexes with metatartaric acid were 37.35 mg/g, 32.02 mg/g, 32.78 mg/g and 28.31 mg/g on Lewatit TP 207 and 42.15 mg/g, 34.32 mg/g, 27.76 mg/g and 21.70 mg/g on Lewatit TP 260, respectively. The sorption optimum pH was 7. Temperature does not affect the sorption process significantly. The sorption data were well fitted by the Langmuir adsorption model whereas kinetics of the sorption process was well described by the pseudo second order kinetics equation.