Application of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for the prediction of EL-AGAMY wastewater treatment plant performance-EGYPT

A reliable model for any Wastewater Treatment Plant WWTP is essential in order to provide a tool for predicting its performance and to form a basis for controlling the operation of the process. This would minimize the operation costs and assess the stability of environmental balance. This paper focuses on applying an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach with a FeedForward Back-Propagation to predict the performance of EL-AGAMY WWTP-Alexandria in terms of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Total Suspended Solids (TSSs) data gathered during a research over a 1-year period. The study signifies that the ANN can predict the plant performance with correlation coefficient (R) between the observed and predicted output variables reached up to 0.90. Moreover, ANN provides an effective analyzing and diagnosing tool to understand and simulate the non-linear behavior of the plant, and is used as a valuable performance assessment tool for plant operators and decision makers. (C) 2012 Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.