The present work is aimed at evaluating the kinetics and dynamic adsorption of methylene blue by CO2- activated carbon gels. The carbon gels were characterized by textural properties, thermal degradation and surface chemistry. The result shows that the carbon gels are highly microporous with surface area of 514 m2/g and 745 m2/g for resorcinol-to-catalyst ratios of 1000 (AC1) and 2000 (AC2), respectively. The kinetics data could be described by pseudo-first-order model, with a longer duration to attain equilibrium due to restricted pore diffusion as concentration increases. Also, AC1 exhibits insignificant kinetics with fluctuating adsorption with time at concentrations of 20 and 25 mg/L. However, AC1 reveals a better performance than AC2 in dynamic adsorption due to concentration gradient for molecules diffusion to active sites. The applicability of Yoon–Nelson and Thomas models indicates that the dynamic adsorption is controlled by external and internal diffusion.

In this study, anaerobic co-digestion experiments for mixtures consisting of sewage sludge with food wastewater and livestock wastewater were conducted to assess the methane yields, the volatile solids (VS) removal rates and the dynamic kinetics. An augmented simplex centroid design (ASCD) was employed to design the mixing rate of organic wastes for the anaerobic co-digestion. Also, synergistic effects on the anaerobic co-digestion were studied using models obtained by the ASCD. As a result, synergistic effects were not observed in terms of methane yield and VS removal rate. It was just showed that there was a linear relationship between the cumulative methane yield and the mixing rate of food wastewater. The results might be attributable that the sewage sludge and the livestock wastewater had very lower C/N ratio compared with food wastewater that had a C/N ratio within a range required for a correctly operating anaerobic co-digestion. Therefore, increasing mixing rates of food wastewater increased the methane yield and VS removal rate, but there was not a synergistic effect by the anaerobic co-digestion.