• Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering:BBE
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• 제6권6호
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• pp.376-385
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• 2001

Considerable attention has been focused in recent years upon the field of biosorption for the removal of metal ions from aqeous effluents. Compared to other technologies, the advan-tages of biosortption are the high purity of the treated waste water and the cheap raw material. Really, the first major challenge for the biosorption field is to select the most promising types of biomass. Abundant biomass types either generated as a waste by-product of large-scale industrial fermentations particularly fungi or certain metal-binding seaweeds have gained importance in re-cent years due to their natural occurrence, low cost and, of course good performance in metal biosorption. Industrial solutions commonly contain multimetal systems or several organic and in organic substances that form complexes with metals at relatively high stability forming a very complex environment. When several components are present, interference and competition phe-nomena for sorption sites occur and lead to a more complex mathematical formulation of the process. The most optimal configuration for continuous flow-biosorption seems to the packed-bed column which gets gradually from the feed to the solution exit end. Owing to the com-petitive ion exchange taking place in the column, one or more of the metals present even at trace levels may overshot the acceptable limit in the column effluent before the breakthrough point of the trargeted metal. Occurrence of 'overshoot's and impact on havey metal removal has not been analyzed enough. New trends in biosorption are discussed in this review.