Synthesis of Eco-Industrial Parks Interacting with a Surrounding Watershed

Abstract

Industrial facilities impacting a watershed may be clustered into groups based on their geographical locations. Water usage and discharge for each clustered group of industries may be integrated through the introduction of an eco-industrial park (EIP). This paper presents a mathematical programming model for water integration of EIPs to be synthesized with the purpose of mitigating the environmental impact of industrial effluents discharged into watersheds. The model considers the creation of multiple EIPs, their location, sizing, and tasks. To determine the effect of the discharges on the surrounding watershed, a material flow analysis (MFA) model was coupled with water recycle strategies within the industrial facilities and the associated EIPs. The MFA characterizes the interaction of individual discharges and tracks the impact of the natural (physical, chemical, and biological) phenomena within the watershed on the fate and transport of pollutants. A multiobjective optimization formulation is developed to guide the decisions for multiplant water integration while accounting for the impact on the watershed. The objective function reconciles the minimization of the environmental impact on the watershed, the minimization of the total annualized cost of the water-management system, which includes the cost of fresh water, effluent treatment, and piping and pumping associated with the eco-industrial parks. An example is presented to show the scope and capabilities of the proposed optimization approach.

Ecosystems as unit operations for local techno‐ecological synergy: Integrated process design with treatment wetlands

“…These methods do not explicitly account for ecosystem services and ecosystems are referred to as methods for "fixing problems" as opposed to providing synergy and complimentary to the integrated system. L opez-D ıaz et al developed a model for designing ecoindustrial parks 22 and biorefining systems 23 within a watershed to minimize environmental impact on the watershed through water reuse and integration methods. Even though these models integrate material flow between multiple industries and the watershed to reduce consumption of fresh water and discharge of effluents, the capacity of the watershed to support these industrial systems is ignored.…”

Meeting the challenge of water sustainability: The role of process systems engineering

“…Depending on the resolution of these models, the resulting optimization problems can be very large, so opportunities may exist for developing and applying advanced methods to improve efficiency. Some steps in this direction are described by Burgara‐Montero et al 43 ; Lopez‐Diaz et al 44 ; Ghosh and Bakshi 45 . A similar approach may also be used for assessing water sustainability over a life cycle.…”

State-Of-The-Art Review of Mathematical Optimisation Approaches for Synthesis of Energy Systems

“…In the area of inter-plant water integration, several contributions focused on minimising fresh water , regeneration and waste treatment flow rates (Chew et al 2010a, b) and emergy (Taskhiri et al 2011). Other works focused on minimising environmental impacts (Lim and Park 2010) and total annualised costs (López-Díaz et al 2015). More recently, Aviso (2014) presented a robust optimisation approach to determine the optimal inter-plant water network which can operate under multiple probable scenarios such as changes in process conditions, number of plants, water quality, etc.…”