Early Stage Synthesis and Design of Integrated Process and Wastewater Treatment Networks

Simultaneous synthesis and design of process and wastewater treatment networks is regarded as a complex task which involves many decision-making at the early stage of process design. This work presents the overview of a systematic approach for a simultaneous synthesis and design of process and wastewater treatment networks using superstructure-based optimization. Through this approach, the synthesis and design problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Non Linear Programming (MINLP), which is solved to identify the best processing routes for the process and wastewater treatment. In this contribution, a solution strategy to solve the integrated network problem considers the interactions between the process and wastewater treatment networks by introducing a converter interval to convert the values of contaminants in the wastewater stream into wastewater characterizations. A bioethanol production case study is highlighted to show the benefits of the proposed approach with respect to environment, economics and sustainability.