A design of higher-level control based genetic algorithms for wastewater treatment plants

Abstract

A wastewater treatment plant facilitates various processes (e.g., physical, chemical and biological) to treat industrial wastewater and remove pollutants. This topic recently encourages much attention in different fields to explore suitable methods to be able to remove chemical or biological elements from wastewater. This paper presents a novel genetic based control algorithm for biological wastewater treatment plants, intending to improve the quality of the effluent, and reduce the costs of operation. The proposed controller allows adjusting the dissolved oxygen in the last basin, SO,5, according to the operational conditions, instead of maintaining it at a constant value. genetic algorithm (GA) is used in the higher-level control design to verify the desired value of the lower level based on the Ammonium and ammonia nitrogen concentration in the fourth tank, SNH,4, concentration values in the fourth tank. In order to modify the tuning parameters of the higher level, an adjustment region is determined. Consequently, the effluent quality is improved, help to decrease the total operational cost. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.

Keywords

• Wastewater treatment plants
• Dissolved oxygen
• Hierarchical control
• Genetic algorithms