Removal and recovery of phenolic compounds from OMW by a cationic resin

Olive mill wastewater (OMW) is rich in valuable compounds such as phenolic compounds. Amberlite@HPR1100 was applied as adsorbent to recover these added-value compounds from OMW. For synthetic OMW, Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second order kinetic model were able to predict the experimental data instead for real effluent, were the Freundlich isotherm and the pseudo-first order kinetic model the best fits. The continuous process was also studied, for real OMW the tbp, tst and tex were 1.27 min, 84.4 min and 575 min, respectively. After 645 min of adsorption, 42 % of phenolic content was adsorbed into the resin. An industrial column for recovering phenolic compounds from OMW was designed, which should have around 5 m and 0.6 m of height and diameter, respectively, filled with 112 kg of resin (dry basis). The desorption process for real OMW with acetone 80 % recovery was accomplished after 5 h of contact.