Consensus-Based Distributed State Estimation of Biofilm in Reverse Osmosis Membranes by WSNs

Abstract

The appearance of biofilm has become a serious problem in many reverse osmosis based systems such as the ones found in water treatment and desalination plants. In these systems, the use of traditional techniques such as pretreatment or dozing biocides are not effective when the biofilm reaches an irreversible attachment phase. In this work, we present a framework for the use of a WSN as an estimator of the biofilm evolution in a reverse osmosis membrane so that effective solutions can be applied before the irreversible phase is attained. This design is addressed in a complete distributed and decentralized fashion, and subject to realistic constraints where cooperation between nodes is performed under unreliable links.