Statistical Sensitivity Analysis of heavy metal biofilter models

In this paper we consider the statistical sensitivity analysis of the heavy metals biosorption from contaminated wastewater packed column reactors. In particular the model considered to describe the biosorption phenomenon is the Advection Dispersion Reaction equation under concepts of rapid local equilibrium. This allows computer simulation with random input parameters choosen from appropriate probabilty distribution. In order to have a statistical framework for analysing the simulated data and assessing input importance, we introduce heteroskedastic and mutlivariate sensitivity analsysis, which extends standard sensitivity analsysis. We than apply the method to simulated data and draw conclusions on the fixed packed reactor efficiency.