Nonlinear system identification of the dissolved oxygen to effluent ammonia dynamics in an activated sludge process

Abstract

Aeration of biological reactors in wastewater treatment plants is important to obtain a high removal of soluble organic matter as well as for nitrification but requires a significant use of energy. It is hence of importance to control the aeration rate, for example, by ammonium feedback control. The goal of this paper is to model the dynamics from the set point of an existing dissolved oxygen controller to effluent ammonia using two types of system identification methods for a Hammerstein model, including a newly developed recursive variant. The models are estimated and evaluated using noise corrupted data from a complex mechanistic model (Activated Sludge Model no.1). The performance of the estimated nonlinear models are compared with an estimated linear model and it is shown that the nonlinear models give a significantly better fit to the data. The resulting models may be used for adaptive control (using the recursive Hammerstein variant), gain-scheduling control, L2 stability analysis, and model based fault detection.