Abstract:In this paper, a joint environmental and economic analysis of different Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) control strategies is carried out. The assessment is based on the application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a method to evaluate the environmental impact and the Benchmark Simulation Model No. 1 (BSM1). The BSM1 is taken as the benchmark scenario used to implement the control strategies. The Effluent Quality Index (EQI) and the Overall Cost Index (OCI) are two indicators provided by BSM1 and used to evaluate the plant's performance from the effluent quality and the economic points of view, respectively. This work conducts a combined analysis and assessment of ten different control strategies defined to operate a wastewater treatment plant. This analysis includes the usual economic and performance indexes provided by BSM1 joined with the LCA analysis that determines the environmental impact linked to each one of the considered control strategies. It is shown how to get an overall evaluation of the environmental effects by using a normalized graphical representation that can be easily used to compare control strategies from the environmental impact point of view. The use of only the BSM1 indexes provides an assessment that leads to a clustering of control strategies according to the cost/quality tradeoff they show. Therefore, regarding the cost/quality tradeoff, all strategies in the same group are almost equal and do not provide an indication on how to proceed in order to select the appropriate one. It is therefore shown how the fact of adding a new, complementary, evaluation (LCA based) allows either to reinforce a decision that could be taken solely on the basis of the EQI/OCI tradeoff or to select one control strategy among the others.
This paper presents the application of different control strategies applied for wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). The main purpose is to evaluate its effectiveness/cost trade-off attending a set of criteria. The study has been performed by using the Benchmark Simulation Model No. 2 (BSM2) and the evaluation criteria have been selected taking into account the most relevant indicators provided by this benchmark scenario. More specifically, five strategies have been implemented and compared with the default closed loop control strategy (DCL) of BSM2 and between them. Results show that the control strategies that use the ammonia cascade controller provide better results in most of the evaluated criteria than the control strategies implemented by using only the oxygen controller. Ammonia controller improves the results in terms of effluent quality and operational costs due to the reported aeration energy savings. As a conclusion of this study the control strategy that uses the ammonia and carbon controllers has been selected as the most recommended for implementation.
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