Iranian Journal of

Backgrounds and Objectives: Determination of Fluoride in drinking water has received increasing interest, duo to its beneifical and detrimental effects on health. The aim of this research is investigation of Effect of  activated alumina in fluoride concentration reduction in drinking water.
Materials and Methods: Expriment in batch system and with change effective parameters such as pH(5, 7,9), equilibration time (30, 60, 90, 120 minute), initial fluoride concentration(1.4, 2, 2.4 mg/l) and activated Alumina dosage (0.1, 0.2, 0.3 gr/l) was investigated. Also found data of this research were fited with Langmuir and Freundlich models, kinetic data with pseudo- first order, pseudo- second order and modifited pseudo- first order  models.
Results: The results showed that with increasing of pH of solution, removal efficiency was decreased and optimum pH was found to be in the range of 5 to 7. Also removal efficiency of fluoride was increased with increasing of adsorbent dosage and decreasing of initial concentration of fluoride. Adsorption isotherm data show that the fluoride sorption followed the Langmuir model (r²=0.98). Kinetics of sorption of fluoride onto Activated alumina was well described by pseudo- second order model.
Conclusion: The concentration of Activated Alumina had significant effect on the reduction of fluoride ions concentration in water.The higher fluoride removals were observed for batch experiments at pH=5 because no free fluoride ion is present in the solutions, and it could be casued by electrostatic interactions between the surface of alumina and the dominant fluoride species in solution The kinetic model can adequately describe the removal behaviors of fluoride ion by alumina adsorption in the batch system.