Lack of clean freshwater is one of the most pervasive problems afflicting people throughout the world.

Efficient desalination of sea and brackish water and safe reuse of wastewater become an insistent need. In our group, we are focus on membrane-based water systems. Specifically, we are dealing with mathematical modeling, optimal control strategy design, and estimator design for membrane distillation plants and membrane bioreactors.

Direct Contact Membrane Distillation (DCMD) is studied as an example of a Membrane Distillation (MD) process. Economic Model Predictive Control (EMPC) is developed to operate the system economically extended with a nonlinear observer to provide the estimated states.

 

EMPC estimator
EMPC algorithm

 

Selected Publications: 

  • X.G. Guo, F. Albalawi, and T.M. Laleg-Kirati, "Model Predictive Control Paradigms for Direct Contact Membrane Desalination Modeled by Differential Algebraic Equations", American Control Conference (ACC), 2019.

  • X.G. Guo, F. Albalawi, I. N’Doye, and T.M. Laleg-Kirati, "Temperature Estimation in Direct Contact Membrane Distillation based Desalination Using Nonlinear Observer", Accepted, Control Methods for Water Resource Systems IFAC, 2019.

Keywords: Nonlinear Observer, Direct Contact Membrane Distillation (DCMD), Model Predictive Control (MPC)

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