Artificial intelligence modeling to predict transmembrane pressure in anaerobic membrane bioreactor-sequencing batch...

The complex nature of wastewater treatment has led to search for alternative strategies such as different artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to model the various operational parameters. The present work is aimed at predicting the transmembrane pressure (TMP) as a key operational parameter in the case of anaerobic membrane bioreactor-sequencing batch reactor (AnMBR-SBR) during biohydrogen production using the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) and artificial neural network (ANN). In both the models, organic loading rates (OLR) ranging from 0.5 to 8.0 g COD/L/d, effluent pH (3.6-6.9), mixed liquor suspended solid (4.6-21.5 g/L) and mixed liquor volatile suspended solid (3.7-15.5 g/L) were used as the input parameters to test TMP as an output parameter. The ANFIS model was trained using the hybrid algorithms for TMP prediction. The higher prediction performance was obtained by using the Gauss membership function with four membership numbers. A back-propagation algorithm was also employed for the feed forward training of ANN model; the best structure was a Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm with nine neurons in the hidden layer. By employing ANFIS and ANN models, relatively a good prediction of TMP was obtained with the R² values of 0.93 and 0.88, respectively while the calculated mean square error for TMP in the ANFIS model (7.3 × 10^-3) was lower than that of ANN model (8.02 × 10^-3). The higher R² and lower MSE values for the ANFIS model exhibited a better TMP prediction performance than the ANN model. Finally, it was observed that in the sensitivity analysis of ANN model, OLR was the most important input parameter on the variation of TMP.