Towards context-independent indicators for an unbiased assessment of environmental sustainability in higher education: An application to Italian universities.

Higher education institutes (HEIs) are important drivers for the development and implementation of best practices for environmental sustainability. However, reliable indicators are needed to objectively evaluate the environmental performance of HEIs and their policies. The present paper aims at identifying suitable indicators for unbiased comparisons among different HEIs and for the identification of temporal trends in terms of environmental sustainability performance.

Evaluating the potential impact of energy-efficient ammonia control on the carbon footprint of a full-scale wastewater treatment plant.

An assessment was performed for elucidating the possible impact of different aeration strategies on the carbon footprint of a full-scale wastewater treatment plant. Using a calibrated model, the impact of different aeration strategies was simulated. The ammonia controller tested showed its ability in ensuring effluent ammonia concentrations compliant with regulation along with significant savings on aeration energy, compared to fixed oxygen set point (DO) control strategies.

Improving the quality of wastewater treatment plant monitoring by adopting proper sampling strategies and data processing criteria.

Monitoring is a crucial operation for plant management. However, proper sampling procedures and data processing criteria are not always adopted. Wastewater treatment plants work under dynamic conditions, which poses a challenge for a correct performance assessment.

A novel fuzzy-logic control strategy minimizing NO emissions.

A novel control strategy for achieving low NO emissions and low effluent NH concentration is here proposed. The control strategy uses the measurements of ammonium and nitrate concentrations in inlet and outlet of the aerobic zone of a wastewater treatment plant to calculate a ratio indicating the balance among the microbial groups. More specifically, the ratio will indicate if there is a complete nitrification.

Systematic design of membership functions for fuzzy-logic control: A case study on one-stage partial nitritation/anammox treatment systems.

A methodology is developed to systematically design the membership functions of fuzzy-logic controllers for multivariable systems. The methodology consists of a systematic derivation of the critical points of the membership functions as a function of predefined control objectives. Several constrained optimization problems corresponding to different qualitative operation states of the system are defined and solved to identify, in a consistent manner, the critical points of the membership functions for the input variables.