Urban water management Modelling, simulation and control of the activated sludge process

Sammanfattning: During the last few decades, wastewater treatment processes in urban water management have become more and more efficient and complex. Several factors such as urbanization, stricter legislations on effluent quality, economics, increased knowledge of the involved biological, chemical and physical processes as well as technical achievements have been important incentives for the development of more efficient procedures for wastewater treatment plants. Future requirements on more sustainable urban water systems, in combination with increasing wastewater loads, will most probably further increase the need for optimization and control of both existing and emerging wastewater treatment processes.In this thesis estimation, modelling and control strategies are developed in order to improve the efficiency of the activated sludge process.The first part of the thesis presents a JAVA based simulator of the activated sludge process. An overview of its features, with some emphasis on implemented control strategies, is given. In particular, a new control strategy for the internal recycling flow rate is described. A summary of experiences from using the simulator as a teaching and training tool is also given.The second part of the thesis includes a derivation of reduced order models for the activated sludge process. The resulting models, a time-varying linear state-space model for the anoxic part and a time-varying bilinear state-space model for the aerobic part, are intended to be used for control applications.In the third part, an adaptive control strategy for control of the nitrate level using an external carbon source is presented. The controller adapts and compensates for changes in the system dynamics since important system parameters are estimated adaptively and incorporated on-line in the control design. The estimated system parameters and model states also give guidance about the state of the process and the characteristics of the wastewater. Several simulation examples are used to illustrate the control law.Finally, a new suboptimal control law for the bilinear quadratic regulator problem with infinite final time is presented. The control strategy is evaluated in a simulation study, where special concern is devoted to controlling the activated sludge process, using the bilinear model developed in the second part of this thesis.