wheat bran is a by-product of wheat flour milling, currently most of this is used in feed mills. How best can low cost wheat bran be utilized in treatment of wastewater?
Look into the surface chemistry of the materials. If you want to remove impurities from waste water, wheat bran may adsrob some of the impurities. You should define the surface properties of the impurities and then the surface properties of wheat bran. For example, if the impurities have positive surface charge, then the surface of wheat bran should have opposite charge for the adsroption. You can modify the surface charge of the wheat bran to increase its attraction towards impurities. You can modify the surface charge of wheat bran using for example TEMPO oxidation (used also in surface treatment of cellulose). Also other attractive forces affect, for example hydrogen bonds between wheat bran and impurities. Additionally, the surface morphology of the wheat bran affects the adsorption efficiency, larger surface area increases the contact between the wheat bran and the impurities.
Of course this material has many active sites that can adsorb many materials. However, this material is valuable and can be used in some food industry rather than to be used in adsorption of pollutants. Usually, search . for cheap wastes for pollution treatment.
I am agree with Olli-Pekka Lehtinen and there are many article are present on net related to your topic kindly see them, I am giving address.
F, Kangawa M, Iwata Y, Ueda A, Tanaka Y, Kawasaki N. A study on the adsorption of heavy metals by using raw wheat bran bioadsorbent in aqueous solution phase. Chem Pharm Bull (Tokyo). 2014;62(3):247-53.
Shamik Chowdhury & Papita Das. Citric acid modified wheat bran as a potential adsorbent for removal of Cu(II) and Malachite Green from aqueous solutions. Desalination and water treatment 51(31-33):6038-6048.
Sujata Das, Shalini Singh and Shashank Garg. Evaluation of Wheat Bran as a Biosorbent for Potential Mitigation of Dye Pollution in Industrial Waste Waters. School of Bioengineering and Biosciences, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India. DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/ojc/350514.
Kuldeep Singh. Low cost bio-sorbent ‘wheat bran’ for the removal of cadmium from wastewater: Kinetic and equilibrium studies. Bioresource Technology, 2006