Kinetic analysis for the interpretation of polychlorinated biphenyls removal mechanism

Abstract

Removing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from subsurface water, soils, and transformer oil is crucial to save the environment from these pollutant materials. Hydrodechlorination (HDC) of PCBs consists of numerous chemical reactions and the simple kinetic models may not provide details for the process. To gain more awareness of the reaction mechanism, in the proposed approach, the isoconversional methods of the Friedman were investigated paralleling other kinetic models of Langmuir-Hinshelwood (L-H), Eley-Rideal (E-R), pseudo-first-order, and pseudo-second-order methods. The analysis was validated by laboratory results of HDC of contaminated transformer oil in front of Pd/MWCNTs. The most reactivity was observed for biphenyls with a higher number of chlorines. Finding a suitable model, Akaike Information Criteria were applied. It was attained that Friedman model was the most suitable for monitoring of HDC of PCBs in front of catalyst. Besides, E-R reaction was appropriate to elucidate the theoretical interpretations of the adsorption and desorption of reactants and chlorinated benzene.