Integrated wastewater treatment plant performance evaluation using artificial neural networks

Proper operation of municipal wastewater treatment plants is important in producing an effluent which meets quality requirements of regulatory agencies and in minimizing detrimental effects on the environment. This paper examined plant dynamics and modeling techniques with emphasis placed on the digital computing technology of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). A backpropagation model was developed to model the municipal wastewater treatment plant at Ardiya, Kuwait City, Kuwait. Results obtained prove that Neural Networks present a versatile tool in modeling full-scale operational wastewater treatment plants and provide an alternative methodology for predicting the performance of treatment plants. The overall suspended solids (TSS) and organic pollutants (BOD) removal efficiencies achieved at Ardiya plant over a period of 16 months were 94.6 and 97.3 percent, respectively. Plant performance was adequately predicted using the backpropagation ANN model. The correlation coefficients between the predicted and actual effluent data using the best model was 0.72 for TSS compared to 0.74 for BOD. The best ANN structure does not necessarily mean the most number of hidden layers. (C) 1999 IAWQ Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.