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The development of the tools to implement evolutionary operation as an operations strategy in wastewater treatment plants

University of British Columbia

technical operator of a wastewater treatment plant responds to changes in performance while a fundamentalist operator causes the performance to change. A good operator is both, responding to maintain control and acting to optimize performance. Most opera tors are technicians, afraid to experiment on their systems. This state of affairs exists for three reasons. First, management and regulatory authorities accept consistent suboptimal performance because they do not know what the plant is capable of. Second, many treatment plants are inflexible and poorly designed because the designers have no way to evaluate their work. Third, the operator does not understand what is going on in his process because the data are unreliable, insufficient, incompatible or unavailable. Computer based solutions to performance limitations have had mixed success because researchers have ignored this situation. The goal of this research is to provide a new way to look at treatment plant data that will free the operator to he both a techni cian and a fundamentalist. This new view is based on three paradigms. The Structure paradigm uncouples the structure of the system from the task of reasoning about the system. The Measurement paradigm maps all data collected on the system, qualitative and quantitative, into a single space so that it can be analyzed as a single unit. The Operation paradigm enables the operator to determine the effect of his actions on his process. A computer program that incorporates this approach will enable the operator to learn about his process while operating his plant.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2008-12-18

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3179

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace