A general kinetic model for biological nutrient removal activated sludge systems: model evaluation

Hu et al. (2007) presented a general kinetic model for biological nutrient removal (BNR) activated sludge (AS) systems in general, but for external nitrification (EN) BNRAS (ENBNRAS) systems in particular. In this article, this model is evaluated against a large number of experimental data sets. In this evaluation, the model is first used to simulate a wide variety of conventional internal nitrification (IN) BNRAS systems to evaluate its predictions and also evaluate the model parameters suggested by Hu et al. (2007), and to calibrate those constants for which values are not available in the literature. Simulation results indicate that the model, with appropriately calibrated parameters, is capable of predicting COD removal, nitrification and denitrification and two types of biological excess phosphorus removal (BEPR), namely aerobic and anoxic/aerobic P uptake BEPR. The model is then used to simulate the ENBNRAS systems to evaluate its capacity of simulating the behaviour of this system. Simulation results show that the model is capable of simulating the behaviour of the ENBNRAS systems, including COD, nitrification, denitrification and BEPR, particularly anoxic P uptake BEPR, with the values of kinetic and stoichiometric parameters obtained in modelling conventional BNRAS systems, except for micro(NIT), K(MP), eta(PAO) and eta(H) which required calibration.