A soft-sensor method for online detection of effluent ammonia nitrogen (NH4-N) in waste water treatment process was proposed on the basis of interval type-2 fuzzy neural networks (IT2FNN). First
actual operation data related to pre-treatment process variables was collected and process variables having strong correlation to effluent NH4-N were selected by principal component analysis (PCA) technique. Second
a self-sensor model between principal component variables and effluent NH4-N was established via IT2FNN and model parameters were adjusted by gradient algorithm. Finally
the proposed soft-sensor method was used in a real waste water treatment process (WWTP). The experimental results show that the new method can predict effluent NH4-N online with better accuracy than traditional methods.