Electrocoagulation of fluoride potable water utilizing bipolar electrodes: Statistical analysis and optimization through response surface methodology

This work investigated fluoride removal of municipal potable water by electrocoagulation using response surface methodology that was applied in the development of statistical analyzing, modeling and interpreting the resulted treatment data. In addition the response, residual, probability, surface and contour plots were achieved. Fractional factorial design has been applied for the simultaneous study of the effects of operation time and the current density on electrocoagulation response. The effectiveness of the considered design parameters was well examined to find the optimum experiment condition. A model to perform simulated regression with fluoride removal response gives the best fitted equation of second-order function of two factor variables that has been obtained to find optimum removal. At initial pH of 8.03 and initial fluoride concentration of 15 mg/l, the optimum conditions for maximum fluoride removal of 99.05% were found to be 24.8 min. and 12.15 mA/cm².