DEVELOPMENT OF COMBINED ULTIMATE HYBRID RESPIROMETER-TITRATE METER TO ESTIMATE KINETIC PARAMETERS OF ACTIVATED SLUDGE

The aim of this paper is to present a new development and an application of the ultimate hybrid respirometer-titrate meter for wastewater characterization and kinetic parameters estimation of microorganisms in activated sludge. Currently, respirometry and titrimetry are considered high performance tools with accuracy and frequency measurement. A new implementation of ultimate hybrid respirometer combined with titrate meter was developed. The new set-up of instrument was developed based on the previous knowledge and needed only sensor electrodes. The user interface programming to system control and monitor was developed based on LabVIEW 8.2 (student edition) software packages equipped with NI DAQ USB-6210 (A/D 16 bit). Finally, a laboratory implementation was tested with readily biodegradable substrate, such as sodium acetate and ammonium chloride, to estimate the essential kinetic parameters of heterotrophic as yield, maximum specific growth rate, decay rate, saturation constant for substrate and initial ammonium concentration in activated sludge samples. The parameter estimation results from using respirometric measurements data were close to the default values in Activated Sludge Model No. 1 (ASM1) and other reported values. The ammonium concentration calculate by using base information were much correlated with the amount of ammonium applied to the activated sludge sample. This demonstrated that the new instrument set-up was successfully applied to estimate kinetic parameters of activated sludge and measurement of ammonium concentration in activated sludge samples.