Mathematical Modelling and Control for an Activated Sludge Process in a Wastewater Treatment Plant

The paper addresses the modelling and the design of an adaptive control structure for an aerobic fermentation process under the realistic assumption that some state variables are unmeasurable, the reaction kinetics are incompletely known and time-varying and the influent flow rate has very large variations. More exactly, the studied process is a wastewater biological treatment process, with activated sludge, carried out in a continuous perfectly mixed bioreactor implemented in the Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) Făcăi, Craiova, Romania. The behaviour and performance of control algorithms are evaluated by several numerical simulations and are compared with the real outputs of the mentioned plant. The aim of this study is to improve the plant performance by implementation of the proposed control algorithms.