Utilização da membrana de quitosana como alternativa para tratamento de efluentes com metais pesados

Abstract

The chemical industry is currently a type of activity that has been showing exponential growth in recent years. Attached to this growth, it is observed that the Environment and the various forms of aggression caused by this industry are also debated in Brazil and all over the world. The contamination of water bodies by this industry brings up a question that has presented challenges to most of the several areas of engineering, which is the contamination by heavy metals. Within this context we have been incessantly trying to find efficient ways to treat these contaminated water bodies. Thus, a new, cheap, renewable and economically viable material is presented: chitosan. Currently, this biopolymer is being used in several areas, such as medicine, agriculture, biotechnology, cosmetics industry, food products and, peculiarly, as discussed in this paper, as adsorbent in the removal of metallic species of industrial effluents. The use of chitosan as a raw material to obtain membranes and the applications of these membranes in adsorption processes presented satisfactory results, reaching considerable reductions in the levels of metals in synthetic solutions.