Design procedure for water/wastewater minimization: single contaminant

Development of methodologies to minimize water use in industries has become an important area in Process Integration due to an increase in environmental awareness, at the cost of fresh water, of effluent treatment and disposal. In this context, this paper presents a heuristic algorithmic procedure, water source diagram procedure (WSD), to synthesize water mass-exchange networks for the following different situations: (i) water re-use; (ii) availability of multiple external water sources in the industrial plant; (iii) water losses along the process; (iv) flowrate constraints; (v) regeneration before re-use in other operations; and (vi) regeneration followed by recycling. WSD is a new tool presented as part of the approach and allow that example networks are also created. It was applied in a single contaminant example case, and it can easily be extended to multiple contaminant processes. This new procedure has advantageous features when compared to other available methodologies. Among them the procedure uses hand calculations, a very useful feature for process engineers.