Control of an Integrated Biological Wastewater Treatment System

This paper presents the design of a model predictive controller (MPC) for a set of integrated biological reactors, which is a part of NASA´s advanced regenerative wastewater treatment system. A first principles model developed by [1] is used to design the a centralized control system to regulate the performance of the integrated biological reactors for on-supply & on-demand operations simultaneously. The MPC design is implemented and tested on a testbed that is 1/20th the scale of the actual biological reactors. For comparison, the performance of a set of decentralized single loop feedback controllers is compared to the centralized MPC for an expected set of disturbances.