Several Small or Single Large? Quantifying the Catchment-Wide Performance of On-Site Wastewater Treatment Plants with Inaccurate Sensors
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Date
2023-01-17
Publication Type
Journal Article
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yes
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Abstract
On-site wastewater treatment plants (OSTs) often lack monitoring, resulting in unreliable treatment performance. They thus appear to be a stopgap solution despite their potential contribution to circular water management. Low-maintenance but inaccurate soft sensors are emerging that address this concern. However, how their inaccuracy impacts the catchment-wide treatment performance of a system of many OSTs has not been quantified. We develop a stochastic model to estimate catchment wide OST performances with a Monte Carlo simulation. In our study, soft sensors with a 70% accuracy improved the treatment performance from 66% of the time functional to 98%. Soft sensors optimized for specificity, indicating the true negative rate, improve the system performance, while sensors optimized for sensitivity, indicating the true positive rate, quantify the treatment performance more accurately. This new insight leads us to suggest programming two soft sensors in practical settings with the same hardware sensor data as input: one soft sensor geared to high specificity for maintenance scheduling and one geared to high sensitivity for performance quantification. Our findings suggest that a maintenance strategy combining inaccurate sensors with appropriate alarm management can vastly improve the mean catchment wide treatment performance of a system of OSTs.
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published
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Journal / series
Volume
57 (2)
Pages / Article No.
1114 - 1122
Publisher
American Chemical Society
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Software
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Subject
parameter optimization; sensor-based maintenance; soft sensors; WRRF
Organisational unit
03989 - Maurer, Max / Maurer, Max