Feedback control aspects of nitrogen removal in wastewater treatment

In this paper an investigation of some feedback control issues for wastewater treatment control is presented. The purpose of this investigation is to reveal what we can achieved with feedback control for a given system and whether more sophisticated control algorithms can improve closed-loop performance. The investigation is divided into performance and power consumption studies. The result of the first part is that hard constraints and not the nonlinear system dynamics is the main issue to deal with in a given case due to the chosen criterion for performance evaluation. Feedback control on the other hand influences plant power consumption. A few relatively simple strategies have been shown that could be used to decrease power consumption.