The coagulation-flocculation process incorporated with
membrane separation technology will become a new
approach for palm oil mill effluent (POME) treatment as
well as water reclamation and reuse. In our current research,
a membrane pilot plant has been used for POME treatment
where the coagulation-flocculation process plays an
important role as a pretreatment process for the mitigation
of membrane fouling problems. The pretreated POME
with low turbidity values and high water recovery are the
main objectives to be achieved through the coagulationflocculation
process. Therefore, treatment optimization to
serve these purposes was performed using jar tests and
applying a response surface methodology (RSM) to the
results. A 23 full-factorial central composite design (CCD)
was chosen to explain the effect and interaction of three
factors: coagulant dosage, flocculent dosage, and pH.
The CCD is successfully demonstrated to efficiently determine
the optimized parameters, where 78% of water recovery
with a 20 NTU turbidity value can be obtained at the optimum
value of coagulant dosage, flocculent dosag