Soft-sensor for TSS in Effluent of Primary Clarifier of

Industrial Effluent Treatment Plant

Nital Patel1, Jayesh Ruparelia2, Jayesh Barve3
1
Instrumentation & Control Engineering Department, Nirma University, Ahmedabad, INDIA-382481
(e-mail: nital.patel@nirmauni.ac.in)
2
Chemical Engineering Department, Nirma University, Ahmedabad, INDIA-382481
(e-mail: jr@nirmauni.ac.in)
3
GE Global Research, Bangalore, INDIA-560066
(e-mail: barve.jayesh@gmail.com)

Abstract. Measurement of TSS is of interest and important to accomplish good

quality control in wastewater treatment plants. This paper covers work towards
the development of a soft-sensor to estimate total suspended solids (TSS) in the
effluent of a primary clarifier subsystem in a typical industrial effluent
treatment plant (IETP). The data pre-processing has been done using 3σ edit
rule and statistical technique has been applied for the development of soft-
sensor to predict the clarifier effluent TSS as a function of clarifier influent
flow rate and influent TSS. The data set has been collected from real-life plant
located at Ahmedabad. A set of data is used for the soft-sensor development
and other set of data has been used for model validation. The performance
analysis has been evaluated based on the absolute percentage error and it is
observed that the absolute percentage error is less than 20%.

Keywords: Primary clarifier, Soft-sensor, Total suspended solids,

Effluent, Wastewater

1 Introduction

The observance of environmental pollution issues and safety rules contribute to

increase the complexity of the various industries. Companies are required to respect
laws that enforce more and more strict limits on product specifications and pollutant
emissions of industrial plants. As one of the aspects to fulfill these requirements is
development of sophisticated instrumentation systems. Software sensors provide an
alternative to hardware sensors. In this context research on developing soft-sensors
for various parameters has been extensively carried out in last decade [1]. A literature
review on data driven soft sensing methods adopted for biological wastewater
treatment plants has been discussed by Haimi et al [2]. Fuzzy network and influent
quality based approach for the prediction of effluent suspended solids (SS), effluent
chemical oxygen demand (COD) and effluent pH has been presented by Pai et al [3].
Adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system has been developed by Wan et al. for
the prediction of SS and COD. A data-mining approach for predicting the total
suspended solids in wastewater has been developed by Verma et al [4].
 This paper is organised as follows. In section II soft-sensor development methods
are discussed. Section III comprises considered plant and data collection. Statistical
soft-sensor model and error analysis is explained in section IV. Section V comprises
concluding remarks.

2 Soft-sensors and its development techniques

Soft-sensors are valuable tool in many different industrial fields of application,

including refineries, chemical plants, cement kilns, power plants, pulp and paper
industry, food processing, nuclear plants, urban and industrial pollution monitoring
etc. [1].

Model Estimation of
A set of
Measurable unknown
Variables Variable

Fig.1. Soft-sensor concept.

As shown in Fig.1 soft-sensor is a model which processes easily measurable
variables and estimate hard to measure variable. It is also known as state observer,
software based sensor or virtual sensor. Soft-sensors offer a number of attractive
properties:
 They represent a low-cost alternative of expensive hardware sensors.
 They can work in parallel with hardware sensors, giving useful information
for fault detection tasks.
 They allow real-time estimation of data, overcoming the time delays
introduced by slow hardware sensors.
There are main three approaches used for building the soft-sensors: First principle
modelling (physical modelling), multivariate statistics and artificial intelligence
modelling such as neural networks, fuzzy logic and hybrid methods. First principle
modelling technique requires good knowledge of the system and involves
mathematical modelling of the respective process. Multivariate statistics and artificial
intelligence methods are termed as purely data driven techniques. In data driven
techniques, soft-sensor model is developed using historical data obtained from the
plant. Before using the data for model development, pre-processing like outliers
detection and data-filtering are applied [1]. A number of strategies exist for the
detection of outliers e.g. edit rule 3σ, parameters of Jolliffe, linear regression residual
analysis etc.
For edit rule 3σ using estimated mean, normalized distance for every data sample
can be estimated using following expression [6].
(1)
The assumption made is that data follow the normal distribution to get probability
for absolute value of normalized distance di greater than 3 which is about 0.27%. The
xi observation is taken as an outlier when is more than this threshold.
 Jolliffe method depends on , , parameters which are estimated on z
variables. These parameters are determined using principal component analysis or
projection to latent structure to the model variables. Following expressions were used
to estimate the parameters.
(2)
(3)
(4)
Here i is the ith sample of projected variable, p is number of inputs, q is no. of
principal components with variance less than 1, zik, is ith sample of kth principal
component and lk is variance of kth component.
Suitable limits of the three statistics introduced in Eq.2, Eq.3 and Eq.4 are to be used
as criterion for detecting the outliers.
The third technique for outlier detection is the residual analysis of linear correlation
(Warne et al.) which rely on multiple liner regression among independent and
dependent variables in the form as shown below:
(5)
Here y is a vector of system output data, X is collecting input variable data of matrix,
β is a vector of parameters and ε as a vector of residuals. In order to estimate β least
square method is applied using expression (6).
= (XT X)-1 XT y (6)
The estimated output and model residual are to be obtained using:
=X (7)
=y- (8)
The plots of residuals with 95% confidence interval were prepared and data whose
confidence interval did not cross zero axis were taken as outliers.

3 Treatment Plant & Collection

3.1 Treatment Plant

The objective of central effluent treatment plant (CETP), Vatva, Ahmedabad is to

remove pollutants from industrial wastewater as per the governemnt of Gujarat
norms. There are 680 units of the Vatva industrial estate are located in the totla area
of about 14 km2. The internal collection systme is installed to collect effeclunt of each
unit. Morevoer 92 sump rooms are constructed to connect all these 680 units. From
sump rooms watstewater flows by gravity to the six pumping stations. Finally,
wastewater is pumped to CETP for the treatment. Fig.s shows the outline of treatment
process.
 TSSe
TSSin,Qf

Biological and
tertiary
Influent processes
from
680
units Equalization
Tank Sludge

Clariflocculator

Sump Houses

Fig.2. Schematic of Central Effluent Treatment Plant, Vatva, Ahmedabad.

As shown in Fig.2 the pretreated effluent is pumped to the equalization tank where
24 hrs of residence time provided under maximum flow condition. From the
equalization tank the wastewater flows to flash-mixer wherein selected floccualants
and coagulants are mixed and effluent is sent to clariflocculator. In the clariflocculator
the coagulation and flocculation of suspended solids, colloids and some of the
dissolved pollutants take place. At the inlet as well as outlet of the clariflocculator pH,
chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), total organic
carbon (TOC), total dissolved solids (TDS) and total suspended solids (TSS) are
measured per day for the performance monitoring of clariflocculator. The flocculator
overflow is sent to dissolved air flotation. The concentration of suspended solids is
maintained less than 100 mg/l in the dissolved air flotation. During these steps, some
organic matters removed in colloidal state which results into marginal reduction in the
COD. The effluent is sent to aeration tank by gravity where organic matter reduction
is carried out by micro organisms present in the activated sludge. The effluent from
the aeration tank flows through secondary clarifier. In the secondary clarifier
suspended solids settled down by gravity subsequently dischsred from bottom of the
clarifier.

3.2 Clariflocculator and soft-sensor model

In this research work considered process is clariflocculator which is a equipment that

comprises flocculation and clarification in a single tank. As shown in Fig.3, the inner
tank serves as flocculation area and the outer tank acts as clarification zone. Thicker
solids flow out from the bottom of the tank and clear water flows at the top of the
tank.Influent and effluent samples are taken at every 3 hours.The plant is operated in
three shifts. All the samples of three shifts are combined togather and analysed in
laboratory for pH, TOC, TDS, TSS, COD and BOD. The plant-data for the period of
July-December 2015 was collected for this work. This dataset comprises influent flow
rate (Qf), influent total suspended solids (TSSinf) and effluent total suapended solids
(TSSeff). The soft-sensor is developed for the clariflocculator that estimates TSSeff
based on knowledge of Qf and TSSinf, as shown in Fig.3.
 Qf Soft Tsseff
Tssinf sensor

Fig.3. Soft-sensor model for the estimation of TSSeff

3.3 Dataset and outlier detection

The developed statistical model is based on dataset of Qf, TSSinf and TSSeff. Influent
flowrate, influent Total suspended solids and effluent total suspended solids are
shown in Fig. 4, 5 and 6 respectively.

Fig.4. Influent flowrate per day.

 Fig.5. Influent Total suspended solids per day.

Fig.6. Effluent Total suspended solids per day.

Before using the dataset for model development it is required to filter out
outliers from the dataset. The 3σ edit rule is applied for the outlier detection. The
outliers representation in Qf and TSSinf data is shown in Fig. 7 and 8 respectively.
 Fig.7 Outliers representation for Qf data.

Fig.8. Outlier representation for TSSinf data.

The data samples having index greater than 3 or -3 are considered as outliers and
the corresponding data samples are discarded in model development

4 Statistical soft-sensor model and error analysis

The soft-sensor model has two inputs Qf and TSSinf and one output TSSeff. The total
number of available observations were 1410 including outliers and missing data as
384. After removing the outliers and missing data, 80% data points were used for
statistical model development and 20% data points were used for the model
validation. The model has been developed using data analysis toolbox in excel and
equation is as follows:
 (9)

The predicted TSSeff and measured TSSeff is plotted as shown in Fig.9.

Fig.9. Measured TSSeff vs Predicted TSSeff..

The histogram for absolute percentage error is presented in Fig.10. As per the
histogram out of 208 observations 167 observations fall under the prediction absolute
percentage error less than 20%. The cause of the error is due to measurement error of
TSSinf and Qf.

Fig.10. Histogram representation of absolute percentage error vs number of observations.

5 Conclusion

A soft-sensor is developed to estimate total suspended solids (TSS) present in the

effluent of clariflocculator using influent flow-rate and influent TSS. It is found to be
fitting well with the available plant-data, and can be useful to reduce time-consuming
& tedious TSS measurements and hence the resources, time and cost for the industrial
ETP plant.

Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank the leaders and staff-members of
Central Effluent Treatment Plant, The Green Environment Services Co-operative
Society Ltd, Vatva, Ahmedabad for the extensive support to facilitate collection of
plant-data, water-samples, and the lab-analysis in development of soft-sensor.

References
1. Fortune, L., Grazia, S., Xibilia, M.G. (2007). Soft-sensors for monitoring and control of
Industrial Processes, Springer Publication, 27-51.
2. Haimi, H., Mulas, M., Coronab, F., Vahala, R. (2013). Data-derived soft-sensors for
biological wastewater treatment plants: An overview, Environmental Modelling &
Software, 47, 88-107.
3. Pai, T.Y., Yang, P.Y. (2011). Predicting effluent from the wastewater treatment plant of
industrial park based on fuzzy network and influent quality, Applied Mathematical
Modelling, 35, 3674–3684.
4. Wan, J., Mingzhi Huang, M. (2011). Prediction of effluent quality of a paper mill wastewater
treatment using an adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system, Applied Soft
Computing, 11, 3238–3246.
5. Verma, A., Wei, X., Kusiak, A. (2013). Predicting the total suspended solids in wastewater:
A data-mining approach, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 26, 1366–
1372.
6. Warne K., Prasad G., Rezvani S., Maguire L. (2004). Statistical and computational
intelligence techniques for inferential model development: a comparative evaluation and a
novel proposition for fusion, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 17, 871-
930.