Scale-up of boron-doped diamond (BDD) anode system is significant to the practical application of electrochemical oxidation in bio-refractory wastewater treatment. In this study, the performance of a smaller BDD anode (24 cm(2)) system in continuous mode electrochemical oxidation of phenol simulated wastewater was first investigated and well described by the response surface methodology (RSM). Furthermore, the RSM was extended to examine the scale-up feasibility of BDD anode systems with similar configurations. It was demonstrated that both COD degradation efficiency and specific energy consumption could be expected at the same level even as the system was enlarged over 100 times, which implied that BDD anode system could be successfully scaled up through controlling the same retention time, current density. initial COD, and conductivity conditions. Based on this study, a larger BDD anode (2904 cm(2)) system was constructed and systematic measurements were made on its performance in electrochemical oxidation of phenol simulated wastewater. Very good agreement was found between measured and predicted results by RSM. At the optimized conditions, the larger BDD anode system could easily reduce the COD of phenol simulated wastewater from 633 mg L-1 to 145 mg L-1 (<150 mg L-1, National Discharge Standard of China) during 80 min with specific energy consumption only 31 kWh kgCOD(-1). (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.