Adsorption Characteristics of Oxide Coated Buoyant Media (ρs<1.0) for Storm Water Treatment. I: Batch Equilibria and Kinetics

Urban rainfall-runoff mobilizes and transports significant loads of metal species. Promulgation of National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Phase II regulations has spurred development of Unit Operations and Processes (UOPs) Best Management Practices (BMPs) for control of metal species. Recent UOP designs provide both adsorption and filtration using engineered media such as manganese oxide coated polymeric media (MOPM). Divalent metal species adsorption onto a manganese oxide coated polymeric medium was evaluated through batch adsorption experiments using a flowthrough batch reactor. Freundlich isotherms were utilized to fit the experiment data. For the media examined, MOPM, adsorption is pH dependent and results indicate a favorable solute pH range of >6 for metal species adsorption. The relative adsorption affinity of MOPM for four divalent metal species typically found in storm water is Pb(II)>Cu(II)>Cd(II)>Zn(II). Adsorption rates were rapid for this flowthrough batch system with over 50% removal in the first 30 min and over 90% removal within 5 h at a surface loading rate of 500 mL/cm2 min. The pH drift patterns, due to surface complexation, during each experiment, coincided with the metal species removal rate curve. Study results indicated that the inclusion of a thin manganese coating can significantly increase media adsorption capacity. MOPM has a comparable adsorption capacity for the divalent metal species compared to other commercial and research media.