Decolorization of Reactive Black B from wastewater by electro-coagulation: optimization using multivariate RSM and ANN

Abstract

Abstract The present study is aimed to model and optimize the electrocoagulation (EC) process with five important parameters for the decolorization of Reactive Black B (RBB) from simulated wastewater. A multivariate approach, response surface methodology (RSM) together with central composite design (CCD) is used to optimize process parameters such as pH (5–9), electrode gap (0.5–2.5 cm), current density (2.08–10.41 mA/cm2), process time (10–30 min), and initial dye concentration (100–500 mg/l). The predicted percentage decolorization of dye is obtained as 97.21% at optimized conditions: pH (6.8), gapping (1.3 cm), current density (8.32 mA/cm2), time (23 min), and initial dye concentration (200 mg/L), which is very close to experimental percent decolorization (98.41%). The statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) is performed to evaluate the quadratic model (RSM), and shows good fit of experimental data with coefficient of determination R2 >0.93. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is also used to predict the percentage decolorization and gives overall 94.96% which shows performance accuracy between the predicted and actual value of decolorization. The additional considerations of operating cost and current efficiency are also taken care to show the efficacy of EC process with mathematical tool. The sludge characteristics are determined by FE-SEM/EDX.