A Hybrid Methodology to Minimize Freshwater Consumption during Shrimp Shell Waste Valorization Combining Multi-Contaminant Pinch Analysis and Superstructure Optimization

Abstract

The conservation and proper management of natural resources constitute one of the main objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development designed by the Member States of the United Nations. In this work, a hybrid strategy based on process integration is proposed to minimize freshwater consumption while reusing wastewater. As a novelty, the strategy included a heuristic approach for identifying the minimum consumption of freshwater with a preliminary design of the water network, considering the concept of reuse and multiple pollutants. Then, mathematical programming techniques were applied to evaluate the possibilities of regeneration of the source streams through the inclusion of intercept units and establish the optimal design of the network. This strategy was used in the shrimp shell waste process to obtain chitosan, where a minimum freshwater consumption of 277 t/h was identified, with a reuse strategy and an optimal value of US $5.5 million for the design of the water network.

Simultaneous Synthesis of Single and Multiple Contaminants Water Networks Using LINGO and Excel Software

“…However, pinch and graphical based methods are suitable only for solving simple case studies; when the plant includes a high number of streams, it would be difficult to be solved via graphical based methods. Another group of research works used combined pinch and mathematical programming techniques were introduced to overcome the limitation of graphical methods for optimizing water-wastewater networks [26][27][28][29][30].…”