Innovative approach for predicting biogas production from large-scale anaerobic digester using long-short term memory...

An artificial neural network (ANN) model called long-short term memory (LSTM), coupled with a genetic algorithm (GA) for feature selection, was used to predict biogas production of large-scale anaerobic digesters (ADs) of Tehran South Wastewater Treatment Plant (Iran), with a biogas production of approximately 30,000 Nm³/d. In order to employ the real conditions, the hydraulic retention time (HRT) of the ADs (21 days) was considered as the LSTM look-back window. To evaluate the model predictions, three different scenarios were defined. In the first scenario, the model predicted the produced biogas by using raw wastewater characteristics and reached the coefficient of determination of R² = 0.84. The GA selected four out of eleven parameters of raw wastewater, including loads of BOD₅, COD, TSS, and TN (kg/d), as the most informative data for the model. In the second scenario, the model predicted the produced biogas by employing the data of the thickened sludge streams entering the ADs and yielded a higher accuracy (R² = 0.89). In this scenario, GA selected two out of six parameters of the sludge streams, including total flow rate (m³/d) and average solids content (w/w%). Finally, in the third scenario, by putting the parameters of the two previous scenarios together, the model's prediction accuracy increased slightly (R² = 0.90). The results demonstrated that the GA-LSTM modeling technique could achieve reliable performance in predicting biogas production of large-scale ADs by including HRT in modeling procedure. It was also found that the raw wastewater characteristics severely affect AD behavior and can be successfully used as the input data of the AD models.