Abstract
Ammonia control in municipal wastewater treatment plants typically requires maintenance-intensive instrumentation. A low maintenance alternative is sought for small- to medium-scale applications. To this end, a pH-based soft-sensor is proposed to detect ammonia peak load events. This soft-sensor is based on a newly developed technique for qualitative trend analysis and is combined with a rule-based controller. The use of qualitative trend analysis makes this soft-sensor tolerant towards sensor drifts and thereby reduces the maintenance effort. The method allows controlling any process in which relative changes in the measured output are informative about the system output.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 121-133 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Control Engineering Practice |
| Volume | 70 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This work was supported by the Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI) of the Swiss Federal Department of Economic Affairs Education and Research (EAER). (CTI project no. 14351.1 PFIW-IW ). The authors thank Prof. Dr. Eberhard Morgenroth (Eawag, Switzerland) and Prof. Dr. Hansruedi Siegrist (Eawag, Switzerland) for their helpful discussions leading to this article and the staff of the participating WWTPs for their support in the field campaigns.
Keywords
- Activated sludge
- Aeration
- Ammonia control
- Hidden Markov model
- Process monitoring
- Qualitative trend analysis
