Adaptive modeling and classification of the secondary settling tank

Abstract

In biological wastewater treatment plants the biomass is separated from the treated wastewater in the secondary settler; thus, efficient operation of the secondary settler is crucial to achieving satisfactory effluent quality in the wastewater treatment process (WWTP). In the present work, system identification and soft-computing techniques were used to formulate a model for predicting the solid volume index (SVI) and classification of the sludge bulking phenomenon in the settler. An adaptive time series model was applied to predict the SVI of the secondary settler; this model uses the recursive least square (RLS) method to update the model parameters. The method for classifying the current state of the secondary settler is based on the strong correlation that was observed between the settler state and the values of the time series model parameters, which enabled the time series model parameters to be used as effective features for monitoring the secondary settler. To classify the current state of the secondary settler, a neural network (NN) was used to classify the adaptive time series model parameters, where a hybrid Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to decide the number of hidden nodes of the NN classifier. Application of the proposed method to a full-scale WWTP demonstrated the utility of the method for simultaneously predicting the SVI value of the secondary settler and classifying the current state of the settler.