Flocculation is an important method to treat paper manufacturing wastewater. Coagulants and flocculants added to wastewater facilitate the aggregation and sedimentation of various particles in the wastewater and lead to the formation of floc networks which can be easily removed using physical methods. The goal of this paper is to determine the optimal hydraulic conditions using machine learning in order to enable efficient flocculation and improve performance during the treatment of deinking wastewater. Experiments using polymerized aluminum chloride as flocculant to treat deinking wastewater were carried out. Based on the orthogonal array test, 16 different combinations of hydraulic conditions were chosen to investigate the performance of flocculation, which was indicated by the turbidity of the solution after treatment. To develop a model representing the relationship between the hydraulic conditions and the performance of wastewater treatment, the machine learning methods, support vector regression and Gaussian process regression, were compared, whereby the support vector regression method was chosen. According to the fitness function derived from the support vector regression model, a genetic algorithm was applied to evaluate the optimal hydraulic conditions. Based on the optimal conditions determined by the genetic algorithm and real-life experience, a set of hydraulic conditions were implemented experimentally. After treatment under higher stirring speed at 120 rpm for 1 min and lower stirring speed at 20 rpm for 5 min at a temperature of 20 °C, the turbidity of deinking wastewater was measured as 1 NTU. The turbidity reduction was as high as 99.6%, which indicated good performance of the deinking wastewater treatment.

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