A simple and efficient feedback control strategy for wastewater denitrification

Cédric Join (1, 2, 3) , Jean Bernier (4) , Stéphane Mottelet (5) , Michel Fliess (3, 6) , Sabrina Rechdaoui-Guérin (4) , Sam Azimi (4) , Vincent Rocher (4)

1 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy
2 NON-A - Non-Asymptotic estimation for online systems
3 AL.I.E.N. - ALgèbre pour Identification & Estimation Numériques
4 SIAAP - Direction du Développement et de la Prospective
5 TIMR - Transformation Intégrée de la Matière Renouvelable
6 LIX - Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]

Due to severe mathematical modeling and calibration difficulties open-loop feedforward control is mainly employed today for wastewater denitrification, which is a key ecological issue. In order to improve the resulting poor performances a new model-free control setting and its corresponding "intelligent" controller are introduced. The pitfall of regulating two output variables via a single input variable is overcome by introducing also an open-loop knowledge-based control deduced from the plant behavior. Several convincing computer simulations are presented and discussed.

Keywords: wastewater - treatment - treatment biological; algebraic estimation techniques; knowledge-based control; artificial intelligence; intelligent P controllers; model-free control; robustness performance; feedback control design; denitrification; biofiltration

Domains: Environmental Engineering; Ecology, environment; Automatic Control Engineering; Systems and Control [cs.SY]; Artificial Intelligence [cs.AI]; Automatic; Chemical and Process Engineering; Optimization and Control [math.OC]

Cédric Join, Jean Bernier, Stéphane Mottelet, Michel Fliess, Sabrina Rechdaoui-Guérin, et al.. A simple and efficient feedback control strategy for wastewater denitrification. 20th IFAC World Congress, IFAC 2017, Jul 2017, Jul 2017, Toulouse, France. pp.7657-7662, ⟨10.1016/j.ifacol.2017.08.1167⟩. ⟨hal-01488199v2⟩