Study the characteristics of porcellanite rocks and applied as a sorbent for removing crude oil

ABSTRACT The utilization of porcellanite rocks as a natural inorganic sorbent for crude oil sorption was investigated in this study. The experiments were achieved in batch operation, the efficiency of porcellanite was studied with different quantities of sorbent weight, grain size, mixing times and temperature. The effect of oil–water mixture pH on the sorption effectiveness of porcellanite at various pH value was tested. Porcellanite was chemically treated with HCl and NaOH to enhance the effectiveness of oil removal. The results show that porcellanite had good sorption effectiveness for crude oil at various pH and temperature. The maximum crude oil removal (82.2%) was obtained at a mixing duration of 20 min at room temperature and 3 g raw porcellanite with grain size 250 µm. Under optimized conditions, the raw porcellanite was found to adsorb about 82.2% of oil in the prepared sample. The study demonstrated that porcellanite has significant potential as a low-cost sorbent for oil spill cleanup.