What is Tailing

Electrocoagulation can be effectively used in the elimination of the colloids from the tailings of the mineral industries. Owing to the numerous operational parameters of this physicochemical process, the best engineering technique for the characterization of the process is RSM. In this chapter, a non-transformed quadratic model is firstly formed considering the supernatant turbidity of the electrocoagulation experiments as a function of temperature, pH, and electrical current. Then, the non-normality and the heteroscedasticity of this initial model was indicated. These drawbacks were improved by using the Box-Cox transformation with λ of -0.32 and a new model with a perfect normality and homoscedasticity was obtained. The R2 value increased from 81.60% to 99.48% and adjusted R2 increased from 48.48% to 99.22% upon the transformation. According to the confirmed optimization results of the Box-Cox transformed model, the maximum desirability was obtained at pH of 5, temperature of 85°C, and electrical current of 0.25A, and the supernatant turbidity decreased down to 2.25 NTU.