Wastewater Quality Screening Using Affinity Propagation Clustering and Entropic Methods for Small Saturated Nonlinear Orthogonal Datasets

Wastewater recycling efficiency improvement is vital to arid regions, where crop irrigation is imperative. Analyzing small, unreplicated–saturated, multiresponse, multifactorial datasets from novel wastewater electrodialysis (ED) applications requires specialized screening/optimization techniques. A new approach is proposed to glean information from structured Taguchi-type sampling schemes (nonlinear fractional factorial designs) in the case that direct uncertainty quantification is not computable. It uses a double information analysis–affinity propagation clustering and entropy to simultaneously discern strong effects and curvature type while profiling multiple water-quality characteristics. Three water quality indices, which are calculated from real ED process experiments, are analyzed by examining the hierarchical behavior of four controlling factors: (1) the dilute flow, (2) the cathode flow, (3) the anode flow, and (4) the voltage rate. The three water quality indices are: the removed sodium content, the sodium adsorption ratio, and the soluble sodium percentage. The factor that influences the overall wastewater separation ED performance is the dilute flow, according to both analyses’ versions. It caused the maximum contrast difference in the heatmap visualization, and it minimized the relative information entropy at the two operating end points. The results are confirmed with a second published independent dataset. Furthermore, the final outcome is scrutinized and found to agree with other published classification and nonparametric screening solutions. A combination of modern classification and simple entropic methods which are offered through freeware R-packages might be effective for testing high-complexity ‘small-and-dense’ nonlinear OA datasets, highlighting an obfuscated experimental uncertainty.