Identification of industrial wastewater by clustering wastewater treatment plant influent ultraviolet visible spectra

A procedure is proposed which allows the detection of industrial discharge events at the inlet of a wastewater treatment plant without the need for measurements performed at the industry, for special equipment and for exact knowledge of the industrial sewage. By performing UV/Vis measurements at the inlet of a plant and analyzing them with a two-staged clustering method consisting of the self-organizing map algorithm and the Ward clustering method, typical sewage clusters can be found. In an experiment performed at a mid-sized Swiss plant, one cluster of a cluster model with five clusters could be attributed to an industrial laundry. Out of 95 laundry discharging events measured in a validation period, 93 were correctly detected by the proposed algorithm, two were false positives and five were false negatives.