Activated carbon derived from the date palm leaflets as multifunctional electrodes in capacitive deionization system

Activated carbon (AC) powder was fabricated from locally available date palm leaflets by using sodium hydroxide activation and utilized as electrodes in flow-between capacitive deionization (CDI) system. The surface physical, chemical and electrochemical properties of the fabricated AC powder were analysed and presented. The fabricated AC powder was used as electrodes in CDI system to investigate the desalination performance under the influence of various salt ions concentrations as well as applied potentials. The results were found that the salt adsorption capacity was limited by the amount of mesopores presented in the AC electrodes. The maximum salt adsorption capacity achieved with the fabricated AC electrodes was 5.38 mg/g for 100 ppm of NaCl solution. Moreover, the removal and electro-degradation of methylene blue (MB) was also conducted by CDI technique and 85% of dye removal/degradation was achieved within 130 min of process duration. Post surface examination of the used AC electrodes confirmed the electrosorption and electro-degradation of MB molecules during MB removal and degradation process. The results suggest that AC synthesized from Omani date palm leaflets could be a promising material for waste water treatment as well as an effective way for environmental remediation using simple CDI system.