Fault diagnosis in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is important to protect communities and ecosystems from toxic elements discharged into water. In this sense, fault identification of sensors plays an important role as they are the key components of the water plants control, especially because environmental legislation is very strict when referring to failures or anomalies in WWTPs. This paper analyzes the performances of two Deep Learning models, a Feedforward Neural Network (FFNN) and a 1D Convolution Neural Network (1DCNN) for identifying five operating states of the dissolved oxygen (DO) sensor: normal and faulty (bias, stuck, spike and precision degradation faults). The experiments were conducted on the Benchmark Simulator Model No 2 (BSM2) developed by the IWA Task Group. The performance of the Deep Learning (DL) classifiers was evaluated via accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The best overall classification accuracy was obtained by FFNN, 98.32% for training and 98.30% for testing.

EU's Urban Wastewater Directive requires the efficient removal of organic matter from domestic wastewater. The required treatment efficiencies (COD>75%, BOD >70%) are not expected to be achieved without biological treatment. Norway has many treatment plants without biological processes and huge investments require to comply with the EU requirements. This article presents results documenting the possibility of achieving EU requirements at mechanical-chemical treatment plants, challenging the common perception of their inability to achieve such high removal rates. Data-driven models and hybrid soft sensors are utilized in achieving these results and possible mechanisms of removal are discussed.

The management of wastewater is a significant global concern that calls for innovative solutions to lessen its negative effects on the environment. Conventional techniques of treating wastewater need improvement in order to deal with newly discovered contaminants, which highlights the importance of providing precise estimates of process performance and resource requirements. The worsening water shortage situation requires a paradigm shift in which wastewater is viewed as a useful resource. It is possible to create an economy that is both sustainable and circular by treating and recycling wastewater, putting less pressure on freshwater supplies, and leaving as little of an environmental footprint as possible. This study investigates the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as software estimators in the treatment of wastewater, with a particular emphasis on predicting ammonium concentrations in effluent. In order to deal with imbalanced time-series data, the research introduces innovative data pretreatment strategies. These techniques include a Sliding Window protocol, Data Normalization, and a K-Fold training scheme. This illustrates the potential of ANNs to revolutionize wastewater treatment procedures and drive developments in this field. The suggested method demonstrates higher performance when estimating pollutant concentrations, showing the ability of ANNs to do so.