Estimation of BOD in wastewater treatment plant by using different ANN algorithms

The measurement and monitoring of the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) play an important role in the planning and operation of wastewater treatment plants. The most basic method for determining biochemical oxygen demand is direct measurement. However, this method is both expensive and takes a long time. A five-day period is required to determine the biochemical oxygen demand. This study has been carried out in a wastewater treatment plant in Turkey (Hurma WWTP) in order to estimate the biochemical oxygen demand a shorter time and with a lower cost. Estimation was performed using artificial neural network (ANN) method. There are three different methods in the training of artificial neural networks, respectively, multi-layered (ML-ANN), teaching learning based algorithm (TLBO-ANN) and artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC-ANN). The input flow (Q), wastewater temperature (t), pH, chemical oxygen demand (COD), suspended sediment (SS), total phosphorus (tP), total nitrogen (tN), and electrical conductivity of wastewater (EC) are used as the input parameters to estimate the BOD. The root mean squared error (RMSE) and the mean absolute error (MAE) values were used in evaluating performance criteria for each model. As a result of the general evaluation, the ML-ANN method provided the best estimation results both training and test series with 0.8924 and 0.8442 determination coefficient, respectively.