IRONMAN - Iron Removal Of Nutrients by Modular AutomatoN

"IRONMAN is a new waste water treatment control technology based on artificial intelligence. It is used to control the addition of iron additives to remove phosphate before water is returned to rivers. It will be much cheaper and much easier to deploy that existing technologies. It will be particularly applicable on smaller waste water treatment sites, where more expensive conventional control isn't viable.

Current treatment control is often wasteful. The worst possible conditions are assumed and enough additive is used to cope with these conditions even if this isn't required. IRONMAN will save around 40% of additives. On a site serving 50,000 people, the cost of IRONMAN would be paid for in less than 6 months by the reduced cost of additives alone. The over-addition of chemicals is also wasteful in terms of the energy used to produce the chemicals and the overall carbon-footprint of the treatment process.

In England and Wales, the progress on reducing river pollution has stalled in recent years. This is heavily influenced by the level of nutrients, such as phosphate, in rivers; waste water treatment works are a major source. In response to this, the EA is driving permit levels down and treatment processes are reaching their limits, so-much-so that the level of iron additives is leading to very high iron levels in effluent. IRONMAN is also a response to this problem.

IRONMAN is autonomous, based on a type of artificial intelligence called fuzzy logic, which mimics human reasoning. Autonomous infrastructure can take away the need for expensive and, in the case of this particular application, often unreliable or ineffective human intervention. For fairly narrow tasks, AIs such as fuzzy logic can be very effectively specialised. They can provide pronounced improvements on current processes and systems.

IRONMAN will be an adaptation of another technology which is successfully used for autonomous urban flood risk reduction. The technology has outstanding potential for repurposing in other applications ripe for autonomous systems. This project will be a first venture into this repurposing and will form a bridge-head into a world of similar autonomous systems."