Hybrid modelling of anaerobic wastewater treatment processes

This paper presents a hybrid approach for the modelling of an anaerobic digestion process. The hybrid model combines a feed-forward network, describing the bacterial kinetics, and the a priori knowledge based on the mass balances of the process components. We have considered an architecture which incorporates the neural network as a static model of unmeasured process parameters (kinetic growth rate) and an integrator for the dynamic representation of the process using a set of dynamic differential equations. The paper contains a description of the neural network component training procedure. The performance of this approach is illustrated with experimental data.