Remediation of contaminated water using some physical and radiation techniques

Water pollution, particularly with rapid industrial growth, is one of the most stressful issues in our country. Getting rid of heavy metals has become complicated and costly and also, one of the most difficult challenges facing the water treatment sector in Egypt and the world was the high cost of treatment because it requires very expensive infrastructure and it is a part of the long plans of governments and institutions, as well as the cost of operating these plants. This work was conducted for an economic, environmental, and efficient solution that using microcrystalline cellulose (McC) for wastewater treatment. Where cobalt and cesium removal mechanism was studied by using Microcrystalline Cellulose and chemically modified microcrystalline cellulose by one of the low-molecular-weight organic acids such as Citric Acid (McC-CA), which are extra chelators for Cobalt and Cesium from aqueous solution and the removal of most harmful of their isotopes (⁶⁰Co and ¹³⁷Cs) also have been studied. Also, an engineered system was fabricated to study the removal efficiency of microcrystalline Cellulose for Total Suspended Solids (TSS). To reach the desired degree of environmental safety and save the effort and time in this research, the Taguchi robust method was used to design experiments to optimize the factors affecting Cobalt and Cesium removal by using Microcrystalline Cellulose (Ion concentration, ph, adsorbent dosage, and contact time) through an orthogonal array ( OA) L16 = 4⁴ using batch experiments technique.The results illustrated the contribution of the factors for both Co (II) and Cs (II) by using (ANOVA), where the most efficient parameter was ph followed by the Ion concentration (C), then Sorbent Dose (D), and the last one was Contact Time (T). The optimum combination for Co (II) and Cs (I) adsorption was ph (5-6), C (1-50 mg.L^-1), D (3-4 g.L^-1), T (60-100 mins.), and the percent removal for Co (II) and Cs (I) was 74% and 88% respectively. Furthermore, when this combination was applied to ⁶⁰Co and ¹³⁷Cs the percent removal ranged from 96.01% to 90.28% for ⁶⁰Co, and 100% to 94.25% for ¹³⁷Cs.