Respirometry Estimations Based Monitoring of Biological Wastewater Treatment Processes

A method is presented to monitor wastewater treatment processes by incorporating multivariable principal component analysis (PCA) with the knowledge of respirometry estimations. Respirometry is the measurement of an activated sludge respiration which reflects the oxygen rate consumed by biomass, and can be estimated from dissolved oxygen concentrations. Because dissolved oxygen concentrations which are available at most plants have the quick response time and easy maintenance, respirometry estimations based monitoring strategy has advantages for the fault detection. The improvement of some fault detection indexes are demonstrated through IWA’s Benchmark simulations.