Removal of fluoride from rural drinking water sources using geomaterials from Ghana

This paper presents preliminary findings on the fluoride removal capability of some Ghanaian geomaterials and their potentials of being used to develop, design replicable easy-to-manage rural community based fluoride removal system. Batch experiments were performed on geomaterials (laterite and bauxite tailings) with raw fluoride-contaminated water (10.31 mg/l) from a borehole to determine their potentiality of removing excess fluoride from rural drinking water supplies. The raw bauxite tailings showed the higher removal capacity. Further experiments were conducted using heat-treated bauxite tailings. The results indicate that optimum fluoride removal is attained when the bauxite is heated to 600oC but removal capacity decreases with increased heating temperature. XRF analyses to determine chemical composition indicated Al2O3, Fe2O3 and SiO2 (silica) to be the most dominant compounds in that order.