ELSEVIER

PII:

SO954-18lO(97)00010-0

Arrijicid Intelligence in Engineering 11 (1997) 4Ob404 0 1997 Elsevier Science Limited. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0954-1810/97/$17.00

Modelling of coagulant dosage in a water treatment plant

Claude Gagnon, Bernard P. A. Grandjean & Jules Thibault
Department of Chemical Engineering, Laval University, Sainte-Foy, Qutbec, Canada, GlK 7P4

(Received for publication

6 January 1997)

The coagulation-flocculation is a major step in the drinkable water treatment process allowing the removal of colloidal particles. The water treatment facilities of the City of Sainte-Foy have been well instrumented and process variables such as temperature, pH, turbidity, conductivity of raw and treated water along with actual coagulant dosage available have been measured and stored each 5 min for several years. Using such a data bank, the objective of this paper is to report on the development of a neural network predictor of coagulant dosage in order to facilitate process operation. Feedforward neural models have been built using a quasi-Newton method along with the early stopping approach to avoid overfitting. Annual and seasonal models have been built and their performances are discussed. 0 1997 Elsevier Science Limited.
Key words: neural networks, coagulant dosage, water treatment.

INTRODUCTION Drinkable water is without doubt the most essential element for mankind. Since high quality water from natural sources is becoming scarce in the vicinity of large cities, the need for water treatment is more important than ever. Water treatment is a well known process that has been in use for several years. However, contrary to most industrial processes for which the quality of the input raw material is under control, the quality of a given raw water source may fluctuate due to natural perturbations. In addition, due to the complex phenomena occurring at the various steps of the water treatment, the ability to simulate the process often does not exist. Then, in many cases, the efficiency of a drinking water treatment plant relies on operators decisions. This is the case for the drinking water facilities of the City of Sainte-Foy (Quebec, Canada) which draw their water from the Saint-Lawrence River. The Ste-Foy water treatment plant, which provides water to more than 96000 inhabitants, has a nominal capacity to process 136 500 m3 of water per day but has been used to only half its capacity during recent years. Figure 1 presents a schematic overview of the various operations necessary to treat the water. The treatment consists essentially of preliminary disinfection, coagulation-flocculation, settling, filtration and
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
401

final disinfection. The water is then stored and ready for distribution. The coagulation-flocculation step which requires the addition of alum (aluminium sulphate) as a chemical

coagulant, is the critical treatment that is required to remove colloidal solids. Basically, alum dosage is chosen empirically by operators based on their past experience, laboratory jar-testing and various on-line information on water quality parameters. In view of assisting the operators to take the proper corrective action, a neural network based model was developed to predict the alum dosage as a function of the incoming raw water properties. The water and wastewater treatment community
Raw

Fig. 1. Flow sheet of the Sainte-Foys water treatment plant.

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C. Gagnon et al.

Fig. 2.

Neural network topology.

have already been attracted by neural network models for several years as reported in various papers.le5 This paper will first present the methodology used to derive neural network models for the prediction of the alum dosage. The results will then be presented and discussed.

METHODOLOGY

The Sainte-Foy water treatment plant has been well instrumented for several years. Various process variables (see Fig. 1) such as the temperature, pH, turbidity, conductivity of raw and treated water along with the actual coagulant dosage are available both on the basis of 5 min and daily averages for the years 1987 and 199 l4. Using this large industrial historical data bank, it is desired to correlate alum dosage, which varies in the range of lo-50 ppm, as a function of the quality of raw water entering the process. In this investigation, the feedforward neural model of Fig. 2, with a single hidden layer, has been implemented. This neural network has five input neurons to include the four process input variables (pH, turbidity, temperature, conductivity) which have the most influence on the alum dosage and the bias. It has one output neuron for the coagulant dosage at the same instant as the four input variables. The hidden layer has four neurons, including the bias. The number of neurons in the hidden layer was obtained by trial and error and results of a compromise between accuracy and overfitting. The composition of the input vector was determined using statistical techniques such as the cross-correlation function. Table 1 gives the cross-correlation coefficients for the input and output variables of the neural network model developed in this investigation. The correlation

coefficients of each input variable with respect to the alum concentration are relatively high, varying between 0.45 and 0.63. On the other hand, the input variables are only weakly correlated among themselves. The highest correlation coefficient is 0.37. Long data time series, where no process variations occur, have been truncated to only retain the steadystate operation prior and after a transient period. As a result, the 5min average data bank has been reduced from 540000 to 340000 elements and then split into three parts, learning, validation and testing data sets. Neural network weights have been obtained using a quasi-Newton method, BFGS version6 in order to minimize the sum of squares of the errors of the learning data set. However, in order to avoid over-fitting, the early stopping method has been used whereby the weights that lead to the optimum prediction using the validation data set are retained. In order to reduce computation time and to facilitate the optimization procedure on the large 5min average data bank, the initial values of the weights were those obtained at the end of the optimization procedure on the daily average data bank which contains 1500 events. A computation time of 5-10 h, on a Hewlett Packard Model 715/80 Workstation, was required to obtain a converged model.

RESULTS

AND

DISCUSSION

A first model, applicable all year around, and called the annual model, has been developed. The network input variables are the pH, turbidity, temperature and conductivity of the raw water (Fig. 2). The performances of this annual model are illustrated in Fig. 3 and Table 2. Results confirm the generalizing capability of the annual model, at least on the data set used for testing. The water treatment process operation is known to vary from one season to the next. To evaluate if better predictions could be obtained within each season, four seasonal models were developed. In order to improve the data bank, the period from September to December 1994 has been added to the learning set and the data of 1993 were retained as the validation data set. Cumulative performances of these models are given in Table 3 and Fig. 4. Compared to the general model, seasonal models lead to better predictions on both learning and validation data sets. It is important to mention that, basically, the models developed represent no more than the previous behaviour

Table 1. Cross-correlation coefficients

Alum Alum PH Turbidity Temperature Conductivity 1.00 -0.522 0.453 -0.630 -0.468

PH -0.522 1.00 -0.226 0.305 0.368

Turbidity 0.453 -0.226 1.oo -0.119 -0.369

Temperature -0.630 0.305 -0.119 1.oo 0.223

Conductivity -0.468 0.368 -0.369 0.223 1.oo

Modelling of coagulant dosage Table 2. Performakes of tbe ammal model for alum dosage predictions

403

Data sets Learning: 87, 91, 92, Jan.-Aug. 94 Validation: 93 Verification: Sept.-Dec. 94

Number of events 243 868 IO 188 18864

Standard deviation (ppm) 3.61 3.20 3.28

Mean absolute error (ppm) 2.74 2.69 2.81

0 -10 -8 -6 4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 -10 -8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10

Predictionermr@pm) Fig. 3. Error distribution of the annual model (learning

Prediction error @pm)

Fig. 4. Error distribution of the seasonal models (learning

data set). of operators, none of the process dynamics. Then, the model mimics the overall background of process operation and would be valuable when inexperienced operators are on duty or when events out of the ordinary occur. However, an attempt was made to identify the dynamics of the process by simulating, with a neural network, the effect of coagulant dosage on the turbidity of the treated water. Such a model would allow one to determine the minimum alum dosage required to obtain a specified turbidity of the treated water. However, due to the fact that the plant operates most of the time close to an acceptable operation point, the dynamics of the process could not be identified.
Table 3. Performances of the seasonal models for alum dosage predictions

data set). To derive a predictive model that would contain information on the dynamics of the process in the vicinity of the operating point, the dosage of alum should be modified randomly and its effect on the turbidity of the treated water recorded. This would provide valuable information that would also assist in determining if the alum concentration specified by the operators is optimal. If such action on the process is not possible because the water has to meet the required quality at all times, jar-testing could also be used to estimate the proper coagulant dosage. Jar-testing is a laboratory technique where samples of the water to be treated are poured into a series of glass beakers, and various dosages of coagulant are added to the beakers. The contents are then mixed for a given period of time and then analysed. This procedure is employed in many water treatment plants but less frequently at the SainteFoy plant (several times a week). Despite the lack of dynamic content, the various neural network models can assist the operators to set the proper dosage. The annual and seasonal models have been implemented on-line at the Sainte-Foy water treatment plant along with a third empirical model that was developed by Gravel. The process computer automatically calculates the predictions of the three models. If the turbidity of the treated water is less than 0.2, no corrective action is taken. Above this value, the alum dosage that is the closest to the previous process dosage is selected so that the new steady-state is attained more progressively. This consequently adds robustness to

Data sets

Standard deviation (PPm) 289 2.36 2.90 3.27 2.56 2% 2.16 2.90 2.37 3.14

Mean absolute error (ppm)

2-21 1.79 2.35 2.46 2.03

Learning set: 87, 91, 92, 94 AlI seasons Winter Spring Summer Autumn Validation: 93
AU seasons

Winter Spring Summer Autumn

2.31 2.62 2.46 2.03 2.57

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C. Gagnon et al. staff assistance is acknowledged, in particular A. Normand and S. Gravel for their keen interest in the project and their enlightening discussion.

the prediction. Another way would be to take the average of the process dosage predicted by the three models. More robustness, if required, could be provided by stacking or combining in an appropriate manner multiple neural networks where each individual model would be obtained with a subset of the original data using the bootstrap technique. By and large, the operators are very satisfied with the assistance of the models. It is felt that this procedure has led to a reduction in chemical product usage. CONCLUSION This paper has addressed the development of neural network models for the prediction of the coagulant dosage for the Sainte-Foy water treatment plant. A large da;, bank, obtained over many years of operation, has been used to develop these models. An annual and four seasonal models have been obtained and implemented on-line. These models, however, do not contain any inforn2ation on the dynamics of the process, only the previous behaviour of operators. Designed perturbations and jar-testing could be used to obtain information on a larger range of operation. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The data treatment banks have been provided by the water facilities of the City of Sainte-Foy whose

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