Disturbance rejection control for a wastewater treatment process by a learning approach

Abstract

Nonlinearities, uncertainties and external disturbances commonly exist in a wastewater treatment process (WWTP). Those issues present great challenges to the control of the dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration in a WWTP. In this paper, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is utilized to estimate the total disturbance and drive the DO concentration to track the set-value. Simultaneously, an iterative learning strategy is employed to adjust the parameters of an extended state observer (ESO) to improve the accuracy of the estimation and reduce the dependence on experience in determining parameters. By combining the advantages of the ADRC and the iterative learning strategy, an iterative learning based active disturbance rejection control (ILADRC) is constructed, and the close-loop stability is analyzed. The benchmark simulation model No.1 (BSM1) is utilized to confirm the ILADRC. Numerical results show that the ILADRC is more effective in the DO concentration control.