Optimization of textile effluent treatment by electrocoagulation process: application of surface response methodology

Abstract

Textile industry generate one-fifth of the world's industrial water pollution and use 20,000 chemicals, thus, this study investigates the Reactive black 5 (RB5) dye removal from water by Electrocoagulation (EC) as the latter has been revealed to remove a wide range of pollutants from wastewater. The study aims at optimizing the synthetic RB5 dye removal by EC process to ensure color removal, using central composite design (CCD) in response surface methodology (RSM) as one of the design of experiment (DOE) and critical technology in developing new processes, statistical interpretation and optimization of the performance. The research also, ensure mass of aluminium electrodes loss. In this study, batch reactor has been designed and constructed for synthetic RB5 dye solution treatment. The main independent variables are current density, electrocoagulation time, concentration and pH while dye as dependent variable. In addition, Minitab software has been used and the experimental runs were determined using the variables and then, optimization by RSM. The optimal conditions are; pH of 6, current density of 47.02mA/cm2, electrocoagulation time of 24.41min, concentration of 10.39975ppm; predict a RB5 dye removal of 98.02%. The confirmation study at the laboratory experiment at optimal condition resulted into 83.1%. Therefore, the experiment proved that EC is an efficient eco-friendly process to remove RB5 dye and RSM turned out to be a powerful tool for EC process optimization.