Surface Modified Cobalt Ferrite Nanoparticles with Cationic Surfactant: Synthesis, Multicomponent Dye Removal Modeling and Selectivity Analysis

Herein, magnetic cobalt ferrite nanoparticles (CFNPs) was synthesized and its surface was modified by cationic surfactant (cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide: CTAB) and its potential to selective removal of dye from multicomponent (ternary) system was investigated. Direct red 31 (DR31), Direct green 6 (DG6) and Direct red 23 (DR23) were used as a model dyes. The characteristics of the synthesized adsorbent (CFNPs-CTAB) nanoparticles were studied using FTIR, SEM, TEM, XRD, and TOC. Selectivity analysis showed that the magnetic adsorbent had selective removal of DR31. A reliable and intelligent model based on Least-Squares Support Vector machine (LS-SVM) was used to present pollutant adsorption efficiency. The presented model illustrates better performance in predicting dye removal efficiency compared to the kinetic models with average absolute percent relative error of 2.024% and correlation coefficients close to unity. Moreover, it was showed that the developed models are capable of simulating the actual physical trend of the dye removal efficiency with variation of adsorbent dosage, initial dye concentration, salt and initial pH of solution. The proposed model could be trustful for predicting the dye removal efficiency from colored wastewater.