Control Borroso de la Remoción de Estrógenos en un Biorreactor de Membranas

The Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) has recently emerged as an important technological product for the treatment of wastewater containing estrogenic pollutants, obtaining high quality effluents. Due to the recalcitrant nature of estrogens, one of the parameters that has been determined as influential in the removal of these substances is the Solids Retention Time (SRT), since this allows a longer residence time of the biomass in the reactor. The influence of the SRT on estrogen removal was simulated in the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox of MATLAB by means of fuzzy control; the values obtained by experts in laboratory scale experiments were fuzzified, and based on the previously designed inference rules, the fuzzy inference process was performed, and finally the output was de-fuzzyfied to obtain again a crisp value. The designed fuzzy control system produced very good results, with very small error percentages for most of the cases, except for EE2 removal in the reactor with long TRS. The simulation allows to conclude that the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox is a good tool to obtain results close to those obtained by a real experimental system.