Automation of chlorination process for drinking water treatment plant: Control strategies

The technological advances of industrial communications in the last decade allowed automatically to control processes that were manually controlled in a separate way. This paper presents the design and implementation for a novel automated chlorination system at the drinking water treatment plant in Sant Joan Despí (Barcelona, Spain). The automation of chlorination process meant two important challenges: firstly, the impact of dead time inherent to the measurement of process' variable of the water and its dosage has been minimized; and second, the system has been provided with the capacity of adaptation to the variability in the water quality and to the appearance of the ammonium in the treated water. The obtained results in this real process by the combination of a feedforward control strategy together with a classical feedback scheme have been largely satisfactory. The establishment of this new control system has represented a significant change in the working model.