The edible plant oil production factories consume high amounts of water and contaminate the water resources. This type of wastewater consists of high chemical oxygen demand (COD) which should properly be treated by an efficient technique. Furthermore, it is containing some chemicals obtained from several sources such as H3PO4 (from hydration section), NaOH (from neutralization section) and citric acid (from nickel removal section). The conventional techniques cannot efficiently treat it which is full of COD. Therefore, the electro-Fenton process as a rapid, compact and efficient one has been encouraged to be applied. For this purpose, 47 experiments were designed and carried out using iron electrodes to evaluate the effects of five significant independent variables such as reaction time (min), pH, current density (mA/cm2), volume ratio of H2O2/wastewater (ml/l) and H2O2/Fe2+ molar ratio on the COD removal. Response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to assess individual and interactive effects of the parameters. The optimum conditions were experimentally obtained at reaction time of 87.33 min, pH of 3.03, current density of 57 mA/cm2, H2O2/wastewater volume ratio of 2.13 ml/l and H2O2/Fe2+ molar ratio of 3.61 for COD removal of 62.94 %.
