Single component adsorption from dilute gold solution showed that silk sericin and chitosan have partition coefficients (Kd) of 500 and 34,000, respectively.
This indicates that chitosan has greater affinity and capacity for gold adsorption than silk sericin.
The biosorbents were further investigated for the separation of gold ion from binary gold–copper, 5-components gold-base metals, and 6-components Au–Pd-base metals solutions and the results are plotted in Fig. 9.
The separations were carried out at room temperature and pH 2.5 and the adsorbed metals per gram of biosorbent were calculated from the concentrations of the metals in the initial
and final solutions.