Competitive adsorption of phosphate and phosphonates onto goethite

Phosphate and phosphonates are both strongly adsorbed onto mineral surfaces and their removal during wastewater treatment is mainly due to adsorptive processes. We have conducted experiments to study the mutual influence of phosphate and six different phosphonates on each other in buffered medium at pH 7.2. We have used phosphonates having one to five phosphonic acid groups (HMP, IDMP, HEDP, NTMP, EDTMP and DTPMP). The presence of phosphonates suppressed the adsorption of phosphate. The monophosphonate HMP had the smallest and the polyphosphonates the largest effect on phosphate adsorption. The presence of phosphate lowered phosphonate adsorption. The competition in the multicomponent system can reasonably well be predicted using a surface complexation model developed for single component systems. The competitive model only failed in systems containing the polyphosphonate DTPMP. With this approach we can predict the behavior of both compounds during wastewater treatment. The calculations show that phosphonates have a small effect on phosphate adsorption at the actual concentrations in observed wastewater. Adsorption of low concentrations of phosphonates was calculated to be significantly reduced by phosphate concentrations as observed in wastewater.