Advances in Water Treatment and Enviromental Management

EXPERT SYSTEMS FOR PURIFICATION STATION 65– Flow measure of water accepted in primary treatment– Flow measure of water accepted in biological treatment.FUTURE PROSPECTS:• The expert system set up in Meyzieu works most certainly on figures based on dryand polluted period flows that can be considered as reliable because they areestablished from statistics and real measures.However, the influence of pluviometry on these values can’t be determined inadvance. The operator can only give, manually to the system, short term and relativelyuncertain weather forecasts.Later on, the use of radar will allow future projections to be more strict and morereliable.– Moreover, we can expect that the implementation of the first system in thepurification station of Meyzieu will be followed by others in the 8 remaining plantsof COURLY.It will be a means to manage the whole sanitation network, to privilege or not somefeeding basins rather than others, in order to reduce the running cost and have abetter control over rejection in natural environment.The increasing control over the management of purification stations and stormspillways and the continuous and immediate knowledge about the pollution releasedin the environment, should prompt official authorities (Shipping Department, BasinAgencies, etc…) to modify the rejection standards dictated to operators in sanitationnetworks. It seems indeed rational to have an optimum output in purification whenthe river receiving the reject is at its lowest level and though purification performancescan drop when the river is in spate.Finally, for the conception, realization and adjusting of this expert system, the OTVCompany and the Sanitation Department of COURLY have done great financialand intellectual investments.It would be a pity to keep this expert system confidential and without evolution;therefore, OTV and the Sanitation Department of COURLY have set up an EconomicalInterest Group (GIE) which goals are:– to promote this kind of system in other purification stations either inFrance or abroad;– to help the operators in defining their needs, in conceiving and adjustingthis system helpful in taking decisions.