Abstract
The oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) and the dissolved oxygen (DO) have been monitored in a municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). Three thousand two hundred aeration–non-aeration cycles were recorded. They were analyzed by defining 16 parameters to characterize each one of them. The vectors so obtained were treated with the box-plot tool to reject those with outliers (abnormally high or low values). The remaining data were processed by a neural network (self-organizing map: SOM) in order to classify them into classes and to obtain relations between parameters to identify those more representative of the system dynamics. They were: the oxygen uptake rate (OUR), the oxygen rise average slope (ORAS), and the oxidation-reduction potential “arrow” (ORParrow, the maximum distance between the ORP curve and its linearization). Finally, the classes obtained from SOM were grouped into four macro-classes by means of the K-means algorithm in order to define four operation states related to seasonal and load characteristics, which may be taken into account, along with the key parameters, in the WWTP management with the aim of improving the nutrient removal performance by adapting their controllers to seasonal and load variations.
Highlights
The European Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive requires the European Union (EU) members to set up sewer systems and biological wastewater treatment plants (WWTP)
It demands that sensitive areas, i.e., those whose water suffers from eutrophication or are to be used for human consumption such as bathing or drinking, must be defined, since a more stringent treatment is needed to eliminate nutrients before the processed wastewater is discharged into water courses
It is not necessary to use all this information to develop controllers. It may be directly used by technicians in charge of plant management to manually adjust aeration or control parameters in the controllers installed in their plants by basing their decisions on the information concerning the depuration process obtained from the study of the system dynamics carried out to find out correlations between variables or to define working states
Summary
The European Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive requires the European Union (EU) members to set up sewer systems and biological wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). It demands that sensitive areas, i.e., those whose water suffers from eutrophication or are to be used for human consumption such as bathing or drinking, must be defined, since a more stringent treatment is needed to eliminate nutrients (mainly nitrogen and/or phosphorus) before the processed wastewater is discharged into water courses. This is the reason why organic matter and nutrient removal has been broadly studied in Europe in the last years. It may be stated that it is necessary to improve the nutrient removal performance and, to a lesser extent, that related to the total suspended solid and organic matter
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