Abstract
The wide fluctuations in flow rate and the presence of toxic compounds can damage
the high efficiency of high-rate anaerobic granular sludge reactors. As earlier these
disturbances are detected, more accurate would be the corrective actions, and less
damage will be caused to the microorganisms involved in the process. The use of
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) determined a latent variable, combining a
weighted sum of operational, physiological, and morphological data, which showed
high sensitivity to recognize the operational problems occurred when four organic
loading disturbances and three toxic shock loads were applied to Expanded Granular
Sludge Bed reactors. The high loadings/weights linked with the morphological
parameters, specially the aggregates size distribution (>0.1, >1) and filaments length
dynamics (TL/VSS), obtained using quantitative image analysis techniques, illustrate
the usefulness of monitor the structural changes of the anaerobic granular sludge. The
application of PCA chemometric tool to dataset gathering information from all
disturbances allowed the differentiation between organic loading and toxic shock
disturbances, as well as the main effects caused by each class of disturbance.
Keywords:
Control, Organic loading disturbance, Principal components analysis, Quantitative image analysis, Toxic shock load
Publication Type: Papers in Conference Proceedings