Reusability of human hair adsorbent
There are different methods in which adsorbents can be
recovered and reused, e.g. compression, centrifugation, solvent extraction, but for the purpose of this experiment solvent
extraction was employed to evaluate the potential of reusing the
human hair without a significant decrease in performance over
time. Fig. 6 shows the results of the reusability test for Type C hair
in crude oil. It can be seen that there was no significant decrease in
the adsorption capacity after four cycles of reuse. This is similar to
the work of Liu et al. [47] using kapok which showed no significant
loss in its adsorption capacity after it was subjected to the process
of recovery and reuse five consecutive times as well as Lim and
Huang [48] four times.