Water scarcity, rising energy costs, and stricter regulations on disposal of industrial effluents have forced a focus on the water usage in process plants. In this context, the development of methodologies to analyze the possibility of water reuse in industrial processes, considering the presence of multiple contaminants, has became an important issue for process engineers. There are a great variety of methods to deal with this problem, and they can be divided in two groups: algorithmic methods and mathematical programming methods. The problem with multiple contaminants becomes more complex, and the available algorithmic procedures are sometimes cumbersome; the methodologies based on mathematical programming present complex formulation and solving algorithms. This paper presents an extension of the algorithmic procedure water source diagram (WSD) to multiple contaminant processes. The proposed extended WSD procedure synthesizes water mass exchange networks for multiple contaminant processes, focusing on water reuse. It also targets the minimum water consumption and simultaneously makes the synthesis of the corresponding water network. The proposed procedure was applied in different examples used in the literature by others authors when discussing their proposals. Confrontation of results shows that the methodology here proposed has very good performance.

No abstract

No abstract