Optimizing the design of an activated sludge/secondary clarifier system via univariate search technique

This article presents a simple and effective univariate search technique which is suitable for optimizing the design of an activated sludge/secondary clarifier system on microcomputers. The usefulness of the proposed optimal design procedure was tested on an IBM personal computer (IBM-PC). The results of this study indicated that the least-cost design of a typical activated sludge/secondary clarifier system can be obtained within 4 min on an IBM-PC. Besides, the proposed procedure was also found capable of obtaining the optimum solution over a wide range of initial step size of search chosen.