Permeate Flux Control in SMBR System by Using Neural Network Internal Model Control

This paper presents a design of a data-driven-based neural network internal model control for a submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR) with hollow fiber for microfiltration. The experiment design is performed for measurement of physical parameters from an actuator input (permeate pump voltage), which gives the information (outputs) of permeate flux and trans-membrane pressure (TMP). The palm oil mill effluent is used as an influent preparation to depict fouling phenomenon in the membrane filtration process. From the experiment, membrane fouling potential is observed from flux decline pattern, with a rapid increment of TMP (above 200 mbar). Membrane fouling is a complex process and the available models in literature are not designed for control system (filtration performance). Therefore, this work proposes an aeration fouling control strategy to measure the filtration performance. The artificial neural networks (Feed-Forward Neural Network—FFNN, Radial Basis Function Neural Network—RBFNN and Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous Neural Network—NARXNN) are used to model dynamic behaviour of flux and TMP. In this case, only flux is used in closed loop control application, whereby the TMP effect is used for monitoring. The simulation results show that reliable prediction of membrane fouling potential is obtained. It can be observed that almost all the artificial neural network (ANN) models have similar shape with the actual data set, with the highest accuracy of more than 90% for both RBFNN and NARXN. The RBFNN is preferable due to simple structure of the network. In the control system, the RBFNN IMC depicts the highest closed loop performance with only 3.75 s (settling time) for setpoint changes when compared with other controllers. In addition, it showed fast performance in disturbance rejection with less overshoot. In conclusion, among the different neural network tested configurations the one based on radial basis function provides the best performance with respect to prediction as well as control performance.