IDENTIFICATION OF ACTIVATED-SLUDGE AND WASTE-WATER CHARACTERISTICS USING RESPIROMETRIC BATCH-EXPERIMENTS

This paper presents a procedure to obtain activated sludge kinetics an d wastewater characteristics from respirometric batch-experiments. For identification of state variables and model parameters a modified ver sion of the ASM no. 1 that describes the oxygen uptake rate of the nit rification process and organic matter elimination was used. It is demo nstrated that the maximum nitrification rate of activated sludge and t he concentration nitrifiable nitrogen, and the rapid hydrolysis rate t ogether with the concentration slowly biodegradable organic compounds can be estimated accurately. Suggestions to improve identifiability pr oblems are given. it is concluded that the proposed method offers poss ibilities to follow changes in sludge capacities, for both heterotroph ic and autotrophic micro-organisms, and wastewater composition. (C) 19 98 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.