In this study, commercial zinc oxide nanoparticles were used. Various techniques such as AFM, XRD, and FTIR were employed to characterize their surface studies. From the XRD analysis, each reflection peak with the relative intensity of different planes determined the presence of ZnO and the spectrum revealed that the particle size was about (27.43 nm), which is in good agreement with those estimated from AFM analysis. It showed that the particle diameters are in the nanometer range. This oxide was used to separate copper (II) and nickel (II) ions from aqueous solutions via the batch adsorption method. The effect of contact time, adsorbent dose, initial concentration, and temperature were studied. It has been found that the relation between increasing the concentration of metal ions and the percentage of adsorption is opposite. The removal percentage was 96.45% and 96.02% for Cu (II) and Ni (II) respectively. Finally, the thermodynamic parameters of the temperature effect were calculated. The values of the thermodynamic functions of the adsorption process (∆H, ∆G, ∆S) indicate that the adsorption process is exothermic, spontaneous, and less random when metal ions overlap with the commercial nanometal oxides. It was also noted that the Freundlich and Halsey isotherms were the best for describing the process of removing copper and nickel ions on the surface of the commercial zinc oxide compared with other Langmuir and Elovich isotherms.