The aim of this work is to study an electrochemical reactor using metallic particles as cathode for lead, copper and nickel ions recovery from acidified aqueous solutions for different process parameters as metallic ion concentration, current density and bed expansion. The reactor performance was evaluated considering the system efficiency and energy consumption. Taguchi method was selected as the statistical technique since it allows the main effects to be estimated with a minimum number of experimental runs. Moreover, it makes use of fractional factorial and orthogonal arrays to identify the factors, which present the greatest influence on the system, and the optimum factor setting for each experiment run. The highest current efficiency obtained were 75.8%, 89.9% and 30.3% for lead, copper and nickel, respectively. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.