Monitoring of Performance of Deammonification Process in Treating Wastewater in a Pilot Study, KTH, Sweden

Due to the escalating demand of the sustainable biological nitrogen removal processes nowadays, deammonification has been investigated by several research groups in many developed countries. Since 2001, deammonification involving less energy and chemical demand has been studied in a laboratory scale pilot plant consisting of two reactors filled with Kaldnes rings as the carrier for bio-film development at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Based on the models developed for the collected data of this pilot plant, this article is concerned with the evaluation of the deammonification process using Multivariate Data Analysis (MVDA) software package SIMCA-P. Mainly four years’ operational data including all physical, analytical, and derived parameters have been evaluated with MVDA in developing six trial models with PCA (principle component analysis) and then with PLS (partial least squares with latent structures). Interpretation of the output of these models would suggest the researchers to consider influencing operational parameters, which have the strongest positive or inverse relationships with other variables. However, overall efficiency of the pilot plant has been proved as the important assessing parameter while evaluating the performance of the deammonification process. Conductivity measured in reactor two, on the other hand, has been identified as the most important monitoring parameter during operational time period.