A Mathematical Programming Model for Water Usage and Treatment Network Design

Abstract

A mathematical programming model is proposed in this paper for determining the optimal water usage and treatment network (WUTN) in any chemical plant, which features the least amount of fresh water consumption and/or minimum wastewater treatment capacity. In particular, because design equations of all wastewater treatment facilities and all units which utilize either process or utility water are included in the model, more comprehensive integration on a plantwide scale can be achieved. In comparison with the available technologies, the proposed method is more reliable, more accurate, and much faster in synthesizing the WUTNs. Furthermore, more cost-efficient alternatives may be identified in certain design cases.

Global optimization for the synthesis of integrated water systems in chemical processes

“…They generated a superstructure allowing for all water reuse and regeneration possibilities, and then mathematically optimized it. Similar work has been done by Huang et al (1999), who present a theoretical model for constructing an optimal Water Usage and Treatment Network (WUTN) in a chemical plant. In both of the above-mentioned works, the integrated networks were modeled as non-linear programming problems and then optimized.…”

Optimization of Water Network Synthesis for Single-Site and Continuous Processes: Milestones, Challenges, and Future Directions

“…Lee and Grossmann 36 presents an alternative formulation of generalized 3 disjunctive program (GDP) for this problem and implements a global optimization algorithm 4 to handle nonconvexity arising from bilinear terms in the flows, concentrations, and split 5 fractions. 37 This work 4 introduces a fixed-flowrate representation for water-using units within an NLP formulation 5 for multicontaminant total water network synthesis with distributed wastewater treatment 6 network. The formulation extends the superstructure of Takama et al 8 in three ways: by 7 incorporating multiple water sources and multiple sinks, by accounting for water losses, and 8 by considering both process water and utility water for improved plantwide integration.…”

A superstructure optimization approach for water network synthesis with membrane separation-based regenerators

“…Conventional models for water treatment units typically entail a representation involving a single inlet flow stream and a single outlet flow stream (Karuppiah and Grossmann, 2006;2008;Huang et al, 1999). We conveniently adopt such models for the non-membrane regenerators in this work.…”