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Wastewater treatment plant improvement by smart sensors and computational intelligence (WAPSCIENCE)

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New sensors to revolutionise wastewater management

With cities getting bigger and wastewater management becoming more crucial, newly developed sensors are promising to help governments stay one step ahead of wastewater mishaps while supporting the environment.

Climate Change and Environment icon Climate Change and Environment

As communities grow, treating wastewater effectively and sustainably becomes more challenging, in addition to much more costly. The EU-funded project 'Wastewater treatment plant improvement by smart sensors and computational intelligence' (WAPSCIENCE) proposed an innovative approach to upgrade municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in a cost-effective manner. The project team worked on developing effective low-cost sensors to measure ammonia and nitrate concentrations in WWTPs. These sensors would be able to alert system users to any critical situation in the plants and warn of any sensor or circuit malfunctions, helping to maintain and manage the plants much more effectively. Advanced technologies used in such a system would be based on ion selective electrodes (ISEs) that would upgrade sensing capabilities significantly. In addition, the analytic and software components would involve cutting-edge technologies such as fuzzy logic, self-organising neural networks (SONNs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs). After overcoming several challenges and unavoidable delays, the project team developed a sensor design that offered important quality and cost advantages over its predecessors. It tested the sensors in different WWTPs located in several European countries, making improvements to the software that forms part of the system. Once these new sensors and software are exploited, the positive repercussions on the environment and health of European communities could be significant.

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