Abstract
The sustainability in a river with respect to water quality is critical because it is highly related with environmental pollution, economic expenditure, and public health. This study proposes a sustainability problem of wastewater treatment system for river ecosystem conservation which helps the healthy survival of the aquatic biota and human beings. This study optimizes the design of a wastewater treatment system using the parameter-setting-free harmony search algorithm, which does not require the existing tedious value-setting process for algorithm parameters. The real-scale system has three different options of wastewater treatment, such as filtration, nitrification, and diverted irrigation (fertilization), as well as two existing treatment processes (settling and biological oxidation). The objective of this system design is to minimize life cycle costs, including initial construction costs of those treatment options, while satisfying minimal dissolved oxygen requirements in the river, maximal nitrate-nitrogen concentration in groundwater, and a minimal nitrogen requirement for crop farming. Results show that the proposed technique could successfully find solutions without requiring a tedious setting process.
Highlights
Sustainability is the capacity to maintain any system in terms of environment, economics, and society
In previous research [8], the basic harmony search (HS) algorithm, which was applied to the optimal design of the wastewater treatment system for river conservation, found good solutions while generalized reduced gradient (GRG) got stuck in local optima, or even diverged
The solution quality of the basic HS algorithm was influenced by the algorithm parameter values to some degree
Summary
Sustainability is the capacity to maintain any system in terms of environment, economics, and society In this regard, the sustainability of wastewater treatment systems is very important because it is strongly related with environmental pollution, economic expenditure, and public health. This study is mainly interested in a wastewater treatment system in which effluent contamination dumped to a river stream should satisfy river quality standards; life cycle cost, instead of initial construction cost, should be minimized under the available budget, and groundwater contamination should satisfy drinking-water quality standards. This optimal design of a wastewater treatment system can be complicated and venturous. While each component in the system can be analyzed separately, the problem can be considered in its totality for managing it optimally [1]
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