Abstract
In the water purification plant, chemicals are injected for quick purification of raw water. It is clear that the amount of chemicals intrinsically depends on water quality such as turbidity, temperature, pH and alkalinity. However, the process of chemical reaction to improve water quality (e.g., turbidity) by chemicals is not yet fully clarified nor quantified. The feedback signal in the process of coagulant dosage, which should be measured (through the sensor of the plant) to compute the appropriate amount of chemicals, is also not available. Most traditional methods focus on judging the conditions of purifying reaction and determine the amounts of chemicals through manual operation of field experts using Jar-test data. In this paper, a systematic control strategy is proposed to derive the optimum dosage of coagulant, PAC(Polymerized Aluminium Chloride), using Jar-test results. A neural network model is developed for coagulant dosing and purifying process by means of six input variables (turbidity, temperature, pH, alkalinity of raw water, PAC feed rate, turbidity in flocculation) and one output variable, while considering the relationships to the reaction of coagulation and flocculation. The model is utilized to derive the optimum coagulant dosage (in the sense of minimizing turbidity of water in flocculator). The ability of the proposed control scheme validated through the field test has proved to be of considerable practical value.