Modeling of Phenol Degradation in Spouted Bed Contactor Using Artificial Neural Network (ANN)

Presence of phenol and phenolic compounds in various wastewaters and its harmful effects has led to the use of different treatment methods. Work on biological methods shows the use of different microorganisms and different bioreactors so as to improve the removal efficiency economically. The present work deals with the use of N. hydrocarbonoxydans (NCIM 2386), an actinomycetes, for the degradation of phenol. N. hydrocarbonoxydans was immobilized on GAC and used in a spouted bed contactor for effective contact of microorganisms and the substrate. The contactor performance was studied by varying flow rates, influent concentrations and the solids loading in the contactor. The effect of these variables on phenol degradation was investigated and modeling study was carried out using the artificial neural network (ANN). A feed forward neural network with back propagation was used for the model development. The experiments were planned as per the face centered cube design (FCCD) and used for training of the model, whereas data from four other experimental runs were used for testing and validation of the model. The network was optimized for the number of neurons based on the mean square error. The ANN model with three layers with three input neurons, eight neurons in hidden layers and one output neuron was found to predict effectively the effluent concentration for the given operating conditions in the spouted bed contactor. The mean square error was found to be 9.318e-12 for this ANN model. Also the experimental data was used to develop second order nonlinear empirical model obtained using multiple regression (MR) and the results compared with ANN using correlation coefficient (R2), average absolute error (AAE) and root mean square error (RMSE). Results show that R2, AAE and RMSE values of MR model were 0.9363, 2.085 % and 2.338 % respectively, while in case of ANN model these values were 0.9995, 0.59 % and 1.263 % respectively. This shows that ANN model prediction is better than multiple regression model prediction.