Adsorptive removal of aqueous pollutants using hydrogels
3.1. Adsorptive removal of aqueous pollutants using hydrogels
Hydrogels of different types have been investigated for the
adsorptive removal of inorganic and organic pollutants. It has been
found that in most of the literature, the focus remained only on
investigating the adsorption aspects, such as adsorption capacity
and kinetics. Other pertinent aspects such as regeneration, reusability, and resource recovery were rarely studied. However, fairly
holistic investigations on hydrogel based process have been
recently carried out by Tang et al. (2014) and Wu et al. (2016),
addressing important aspects like desorption, regeneration,
hydrogel recovery and reusability. Inspired from these studies, a
holistic hydrogel based water/wastewater treatment process is
proposed in Fig. 3, and the pertinent aspects will be duly discussed
in respective sections of this article.