Abstract:
This paper presents preliminary findings on the fluoride removal capability of some Ghanaian geomatrials 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 600o C but removal capacity decreases with increased heating temperature. XRF analyses to determine chemical composition indicated Al2 O3 , Fe2 O3 and SiO2 (silica) to be the most dominant compounds in that order
