Characterization Study of Chitosan - Carbon Nanotube Bead as Metal Ions Adsorption

In this final year research project, the research and experiment will be conducted in
order to study the characteristic of chitosan-CNT in adsorbing metal ions. The comparison
will be made between raw chitosan and chitosan gel in their efficiency in absorbing metal
ions. The objective of the research can be summarized as below:
• To extract chitosan from raw material which is crab shell and determined weight
percentage of the biopolymers that can be extracted.
• To construct new material which is based on chitosan and carbon nanotube this later
will be used as one of the absorber.
• To study the efficiency of these absorber in adsorbing metal ions from industrial
waste water
Generally, heavy metal ions are very dangerous for our health and also to the
environment. Those heavy metal ions such as Zinc, Plumbum, nickel, cadmium and others
can give a long term effect for our health. Nowadays, these metal ions are extensively
found in most of the waste water from the industrial area. Regarding to the environmental
issues, this project was done to determine the efficiency of the absorber in absorbing heavy
metal ion from the industrial waste water.
The methodology of this project starts with the extraction of the chitosan from raw
material which involved several processes such as demineralization, deproteination and
deacetylation. Chitosan which had been obtained will be further processed in order to
produce chitosan gel and chitosan-carbon nanotube gel. The equipment will be used in
determining metal ions in the solution will be FAAS.
From the process which had been done, 70.81 gram of chitosan have been extracted from
crab shells powder and from the data analysis, it shows that the carbon nanotube had
improves the efficiency in metal ions adsorption by 16 percent compared to chitosan and
91 percent compared to chitosan gel.