Identification of water treatment plant based on feedforward neural network

Coagulation process is the main process in conventional water treatment process sequence. It influences the following treatment process aspects: maintaining plant efficiency and increasing the quality of the produced water. This is accomplished by adding chemicals to raw water, such as alum sulphate. To secure the appropriate plant performance, a mathematical model is proposed in this paper for the coagulation unit, followed by the development of the control strategy. Classic PID and neural network based controller regulating the process are used. Tests were performed, based on the real data for water treatment, using MATLAB/SIMULINK. Simulation results showed better values for both settling time and overshoot in the case of using neural network based controller than PID.