1 Adsorption of phenolic contaminants from water on activated carbon: An insight into single and multicomponent adsorption isotherms Pradeep R. Shukla 1* , Siewhui Chong 2 , Guan Ting Pan 3 , Shaobin Wang 4 , Ming Ang 5 , Victor Rudolph 6 1 Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, Australia. 2 Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering, University of Nottingham, Jalan Broga, Semenyih, 43500 Selangor, Malaysia. 3 Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology, National Taipei University of Technology, No.1, Sec. 3, Zhongxiao E Rd, 10607 Taipei City, Taiwan (R.O.C.). 4 School of Chemical Engineering and Advance Materials, The University of Adelaide, SA. Australia 5 Western Australian School of Mines: Minerals, Energy and Chemical Engineering Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth WA 6845, Australia. 6 School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, Australia. *Email: pradeep.shukla@uq.edu.au Abstract The current study focuses on the single and multicomponent adsorption of phenolic compounds from solution on to an activated carbon in the concentration range of 50- 500 ppm at room temperature. The observed adsorption isotherms were correlated using various predictive and non-predictive single and multicomponent adsorption isotherm equations. A strong influence of inter-adsorbate repulsion was evident based on the model proposed using Nitta’s adsorption isotherm model. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1002/apj.2372