Optimizing of heavy metals removal from car wash wastewater by chitosan-ceramic beads using response surface methodology Mohd Farhan Tajuddin a , Adel Al-Gheethi a,⇑ , Radin Mohamed a,⇑ , Efaq Noman b,c , Balkis A. Talip c , Asmah Bakar a,b,c a Micro-pollutant Research Centre (MPRC), Department of Water and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia b Department of Applied Microbiology, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Taiz University, Taiz, Yemen c Faculty of Applied Sciences and Technology, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM), KM11 Jalan Panchor, 84000 Pagoh, Muar, Johor, Malaysia article info Article history: Received 11 September 2019 Received in revised form 31 December 2019 Accepted 4 January 2020 Available online xxxx Keywords: Heavy metals Car wash wastewater Optimization Interactions abstract The current study aimed to optimize the heavy metals (Zn 2+ , Fe 2+ , Pb 2+ , Cu 2+ and Cd 2+ ) from the car wash wastewater by chitosan using response surface methodology (RSM), central composite design (CCD). The independent variables investigated in the present study included chitosan-ceramic beads dose (ranged from 1 to 3 g/L), shaking speed (between 100 and 150 rpm) and time (between 60 and 120 mins). The chitosan was prepared from the shrimp shells waste with ceramic wastes. The result revealed that the optimum parameters for heavy metal removal was recorded with 2.2 g/L of chitosan-ceramic beads, 123 rpm and after 90 mins, at which 50.41 vs. 54.74% of actual and predicted removal of Zn 2+ , 25.60 vs. 70% of Cu 2+ , 32.52 vs. 99.98% of Fe 2+ , 64.49 vs. 76.74% of Pb 2+ and 75.77 vs. 62.24 of Cd 2+ was recorded. These findings revealed the chitosan-ceramic exhibited an efficiency for heavy metal removal from the car wash wastewater. Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 4th International Conference on Green Chemical Engineering and Technology: Materials Science. 1. Introduction The car wash service is one of the most important demands in urban area. Several methods have been used to clean the car. How- ever, the most popular methods of car washing are the automatic car wash and the car hand wash (serve wash). The automatic car wash used 200 L for every wash while self-serve wash used aver- age 40–50 kL [1]. The generated wastewater of car wash processing usually content several contaminated materials such as heavy met- als, oil, grease, organic matter and detergents [2,3]. The heavy met- als in the car wastewater are coming from the brake linings, with sand and dust being washed away and trace amounts of surfactant which are hardly degraded in environment. The serious issues come with the discharge of the car wash wastewater into the water system, which represent a health risk to human and other organisms [4,5]. The chitosan is one of the materials which have an efficiency to remove heavy metals from the wastewater [5]. The efficiency removal heavy metals from the wastewater by the chitosan from the shrimp shells reached 99.8% for Fe and 95.3% for Mn with 116.2 and 74.1 mg/g of the adsorption capacity for both elements respectively [6]. Mohanasrinivasan et al. [7] used the chitosan for removing heavy metals from car wash wastewater and revealed that the removal efficiency of Cu 2+ was 98.97, while was 37.51 for Cr 3+ , 65.20% for Fe 2+ and 86.15% for Zn 2+ . However, the efficiency of chitosan-ceramic beads (CCB) in removing of heavy metals from car wash wastewater has not investigated before and this emphasize the novelty of the current work. More- over, it has to mention that the removal of heavy metals depend on many factors such as chitosan dose, time, pH, shaking speed, tem- perature, concentrations of heavy metals. Therefore, in order to achieve high removal percentage the removal process should be optimized. Response surface methodology is one of the most effi- cient software program to determine the best operating parame- ters for any treatment process. Therefore, it was used in the present study for optimizing the removal of heavy metals from the car wash wastewater using chitosan. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.01.085 2214-7853/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 4th International Conference on Green Chemical Engineering and Technology: Materials Science. ⇑ Corresponding authors. E-mail addresses: adel@uthm.edu.my (A. Al-Gheethi), maya@uthm.edu.my (R. Mohamed). Materials Today: Proceedings xxx (xxxx) xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Materials Today: Proceedings journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/matpr Please cite this article as: M. Farhan Tajuddin, A. Al-Gheethi, R. Mohamed et al., Optimizing of heavy metals removal from car wash wastewater by chi- tosan-ceramic beads using response surface methodology, Materials Today: Proceedings, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.01.085