Improved Estimation Algorithms for Water Purification and Desalination Systems

ended

Sustainable access to drinking water and providing usable water supply for adequate sanitation and also for irrigation based agriculture forms one of the major challenges for the global society in the 21st century. The major subject of the PURE-WATER project are water purification and desalination processes. As a crucial part of a functional water resource management system, the information processing and monitoring of the respective water filtration and refinement procedures are subject to high requirements for accuracy, real-time standards and reliability. From a system engineering perspective, major issues regarding the complex underlying physical principles are to gain an appropriate mathematical description of the dynamic behavior combined with an adequate parameterization and knowledge about the internal state conditions of the distributed processes via intelligent sensor data evaluation in spite of external perturbations. This is required for an efficient and safe water plant control setup. The consortium will work together on developing a robust and online implementable modulating function based estimation scheme that includes observers for nonlinear and distributed hydrodynamical systems with an additional fault detection and isolation concept to identify failing operational conditions such as membrane fouling impact. The designed methods are validated in simulation and an experimental test bench is developed for testing the designed algorithms in a realistic environment. Furthermore, a smart sensor configuration will be designed for joint measurement and data evaluation devices. This is accomplished by combining the expertise from academic partners on the fields of observer design as well as system modeling and simulation with the experience from industrial partners on waste water treatment, desalination and integrated sensor systems by exchanging knowledge between scientists from Europe, Latin America and the Middle East coordinated by EU members.