Water adsorption behavior of Indonesian natural zeolite based on NaOH treatment: A preliminary study

Abstract

This paper investigates about the behavior of Indonesian natural zeolite especially preliminary result before having water adsorption characteristic, whereas their used as an adsorbent. The sources of natural zeolite in Indonesia which can adsorb water are abundant. They rarely used on application in cooling, but in others such as refinery, water treatment and fertilizer. The raw materials of natural zeolite from Blitar, East Java, Indonesia were activated, after that it was under ion exchange process before it goes to NaOH desilication process by 0.02, 0.05, and 0.1 M NaOH. Some characterization tests were conduct to know the surface area using Brunauer_Emmet-Teller (BET), percentage of the component inside the natural zeolite by the X-Ray Fluorecent (XRF) Analysis, and characterization about the outside morphology of the adsorbent by the Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy Dispersive X-Rays spectroscopy (EDS). The result show that natural zeolite with NZFB 0.02 M NaOH is the best among others (0.01 M and 0.05 M) and could be used as an adsorbent in cooling application with BET surface area of 205.127 m2 g-1 and Si/Al ratio 5.9 where they should adsorb water fast and remove it fast.