Design, construction, control and automation of a pilot-scale anaerobic wastewater treatment system

This study has been carried out within TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) Research Project ?Modelling an Anaerobic Wastewater Treatment Process and Developing Control Algorithms?. Anaerobic Wastewater Treatment has become an important subject recently because of some advantages in application. Anaerobic Wastewater Treatment is an important process for treatment of wastewater which has medium and high level pollution concentrations. It is more economical than its counterpart systems, it produces less sludge and produces methane gas which is also known as bio energy. However, there are some difficulties in modelling and controlling anaerobic wastewater treatment systems effectively because of non-linear process dynamics. Establishing an optimum control system depends on mathematical modelling of wastewater treatment process dynamics and selection of correct equipment for the plant to be controlled. In this thesis, the design, construction and automation of an anaerobic wastewater treatment plant has been realized. Then, in order to develop effective controls, mathematical modelling of the process and solutions of nonlinear process equations by means of Differential Transformation Method has been presented. Keywords: Anaerobic treatment, Automatic control, Sensors, Mathematical modelling, Nonlinear differential equations