The increasing degradation of water resources makes it necessary to monitor and control process variables that may disturb the environment, but which may be very difficult to measure directly, either because there are no physical sensors available, or because these are too expensive. In this work, two soft sensors are proposed for monitoring concentrations of nitrate (NO) and ammonium (NH) ions, and of carbonaceous matter (CM) during nitrification of wastewater. One of them is based on reintegration of a process model to estimate NO and NH and on a feedforward neural network to estimate CM. The other estimator is based on Stacked Neural Networks (SNN), an approach that provides the predictor with robustness. After simulation, both soft sensors were implemented in an experimental unit using FIX MMI (Intellution, Inc) automation software as an interface between the process and MATLAB 5.1 (The Mathworks Inc.) software.
estimators; stacked generalization; neural networks; wastewater treatment
