A comparison of estimates of kinetic constants for a suspended growth treatment system from various linear transformations

Abstract

This paper critically compares the performance of several linear transformations for estimating the four kinetic constants of a suspended growth system (activated sludge) by using synthetic data generated via Monte Carlo simulation. The experimental errors commonly embedded in the measurements of biomass and substrate concentrations were explicitly incorporated into the synthetic data by assuming that errors in the measurements are proportional to the ''actual'' values of the biomass and substrate concentrations being measured. Three types of error distributions (uniform, normal, and log-normal) were investigated. The impact of the measurement errors on the quality of the estimated values of the four kinetic constants were discussed.