Cellular Automaton Model of a Wastewater Treatment Process
Luis Benavides, Mónica Alcalá, F-Javier Almaguer, Elisa Schaeffer and Arturo Berrones
A Markovian probabilistic cellular automaton to capture essential phenomenology of coalescence and fragmentation in the presence of external agitation is proposed and its parameter space is thoroughly explored. The proposed model is an extension of a one-dimensional conceptual model, reported to reproduce some basic features of floc-size distribution removal of heavy metals from wastewater in a jar-test apparatus. This extension is multi-dimensional. We report extensive numerical experiments with the parameter spaces for the multi-dimensional automaton to identify the parameters that best reproduce observed floc-size distributions; the proposed extension yields better quantitative agreement than the original model and reproduces in a more robust manner characteristic features of the real-world system.
Keywords: Coalescence-fragmentation, Cellular automaton, wastewater treatment, parameter exploration