Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy analysis of copper and nickel in chelating resins for metal recovery in wastewater

Highlights: • Generation of industrial wastewaters containing heavy metals is growing. • Chelating resins absorption is an effective treatment for heavy metals recovery. • LIBS offers the advantage of continuous monitoring the absorption process. • LIBS measurements of Cu and Ni on single and dual resins samples were performed. • Prediction of concentration is highly correlated with real values (R² > 0.98). Recovery of heavy metals from industrial waste streams is becoming an important challenge due to increasing wastewater production. Chelating resins provide an effective treatment for selective adsorption of metals. Several analytical techniques can be used to assess the adsorption performance, but LIBS offers the unique advantage of in-process continuous monitoring. In this work, LIBS measurements of copper and nickel spectra were performed on single and bi-component resin samples. Single component calibration curves for copper and nickel were obtained with high correlation (R² = 0.99 and R² = 0.98 respectively). Bi-component resin measurements reveal good prediction accuracy for nickel and copper concentrations, the mean relative error in concentration prediction being 4.69% and 7.98% respectively. From the calibration curves, the prediction of concentration shows a high correlation with the real values (R² = 0.99 for copper and 0.98 for nickel).