Background of Study:

Electro-coagulation (EC) is used to treat Industrial dyeing effluent (IDE) to purify the
effluent from potential pollutants before discharge.

Objectives of Study:
This study investigates the effect of three particular treatment parameters:

Electrolysis time
Initial pH
Current density

On COD and decolourisation (%) of treated IDE solution.

Design of Experiments:
There are three factors. Each factor has three levels (-1, 0 and +1). The design follows a 3 3
full factorial design with each combination of factors having three replicates.

Statistical methods used for Analysis:

The entire data for the experiment has been tabulated in the research papers Table 3.
A two-way ANOVA analysis has been carried out using Statistica software to investigate
the effect of parameters and their combined effects on COD and decolourisation (%).
Model:

Results and discussion:

Using three levels instead of two helps in estimating mixed effects more accurately and is
decisive in deciding if the effects are significant or can be neglected as errors.
COD values are significantly affected by interaction of factors whereas decolourisation is
affected significantly by quadratic effect of individual factors apart from single effects.
Interaction effects at 95% significance level have been calculated and tabulated in Table 4.
Each effect has 2 degrees of freedom (3-1). Quadratic and interaction effects have 4 degrees
of freedom (2*2). Total degrees of freedom = 27*3 -1 = 81 1 = 80. This leaves us with 8018 = 62 degrees of freedom for the residuals.

Conclusions:
In the used 33 full factorial design, calculating significance of effects becomes more tedious
owing to the total number of runs. Also, experimentation is much more difficult as 27 IDE
samples per replicate have to be processed and tested out.

Critique:
Since a 27-run replicate is tedious to run, a fraction of 3 3 design can be run. Corner points
(1,1,1) along with central points or axial points with ( = 3) can be chosen to run the
experiment so that a rotatable design can be obtained for the second order Response surface
model.
Instead of CCD, a BBD with three replicates can be designed from the full factorial data.
X1
-1
-1
-1
-1
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
0

X2
-1
0
0
1
-1
-1
1
1
-1
0
0
1
0

X3
0
-1
1
0
-1
1
-1
1
0
-1
1
0
0

COD1
74.6
75.2
69.4
52.9
80.1
8.8
45
68.9
79.7
75.2
83.0
71.9
80.7

COD2
73.7
76.2
70.5
51.2
80.8
81.2
45.4
67.4
80.4
76.5
81.9
69.9
82.5

COD3
74.4
75.7
69.9
52.1
80.4
81.7
43.9
68.0
80.1
75.7
81.7
70.2
82.2

D1 %
72.5
62.7
73.2
21.2
59.5
96.7
32.2
78.4
979
95.9
98.9
77.2
95.8

D2 %
76.3
63.3
75.5
23.6
59.8
97.7
32.5
78.8
98.4
96.4
97.9
75.7
97.8

D3 %
80.1
63.9
77.8
26.0
60.1
98.7
33.2
80.0
99.9
97.8
99.4
78.0
98.3

The above tabulation is the data for BBD design from full factorial design. (12 + 1 data
points)