Enhanced process monitoring for wastewater treatment systems

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) remain notorious for poor data quality and sensor reliability problems due to the hostile environment, missing data problems and more. Many sensors in WWTP are prone to malfunctions in harsh environments. If a WWTP contains any redundancy between sensors, monitoring methods with sensor reconstruction such as the proposed one can yield a better monitoring efficiency than without a reconstruction scheme. An enhanced robust process monitoring method combined with a sensor reconstruction scheme to tackle the sensor failure problems is proposed for biological wastewater treatment systems. The proposed method is applied to a single reactor for high activity ammonia removal over nitrite (SHARON) process. It shows robust monitoring performance in the presence of sensor faults and produces few false alarms. Moreover, it enables us to keep the monitoring system running in the case of sensor failures. This guaranteed continuity of the monitoring scheme is a necessary development in view of real-time applications in full-scale WWTPs.