Optimal design of a wastewater treatment plant using advanced technologies

In this paper, a methodology and software tool for the optimal design of advanced waste treatment plants is presented. The problem of the design of the WWTP is translated into a discrete optimization problem. As a result, an optimal sequence of treatment technologies to obtain the output water quality from a given inlet water containing a certain input contaminant concentrations is provided. The discrete optimization problem is solved using Genetic and Pattern Search Algorithms available at the Global Optimization Toolbox of MATLAB. A typical design scenario is used to illustrate the validity and performance of the proposed approach and tool.