Prediction of COD in industrial wastewater treatment plant using an artificial neural network

Abstract In this investigation, the modeling of the Aksaray industrial wastewater treatment plant was performed using artificial neural networks with various architectures in the MATLAB software. The dataset utilized in this study was collected from the Aksaray wastewater treatment plant over a 9-month period through daily records. The treatment efficiency of the plants was assessed based on the output values of chemical oxygen demand (COD) output. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to furnish input for the Feedforward Backpropagation Artificial Neural Networks (FFBANN). The model’s performance was evaluated using the Mean Squared Error (MSE), the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and correlation coefficient (R 2 ) parameters. The optimal architecture for the neural network model was determined through several trial and error iterations. According to the modeling results, the ANN exhibited a high predictive capability for plant performance, with an R 2 reaching up to 0.9997 when comparing the observed and predicted output variables.