Effective Design of Wastewater Treatment Systems Under Regional Limitations and Influences

The ever-increasing world population and limited freshwater resources have resulted in the need for wastewater treatment methods to supplement the requirements through recycling and reuse. Unfortunately, many developing countries lack the financial and technical resources to establish efficient wastewater treatment process. Geographical and economic differences worldwide make it difficult to create a universal wastewater treatment strategy. Thus, it is important to evaluate performances of different treatment technologies as well as the design variations in treatment plants to model a feasible system that suits the needs of developing and developed nations.

Treatment of wastewater depends on ecological, environmental, economical, and institutional factors. These factors are driven by the regional factors, policies and constraints and each can have varying degrees of influence on the wastewater treatment outcomes. To this end, we formulated a stage-wise wastewater treatment scheme that comprises of all possible technology options and compared the capabilities of multiple technologies to treat wastewater and achieve purity levels of reuse or safe disposal. The ability to evaluate the technology options and create an optimal treatment network is based on the principles of process design, superstructure generation and optimization.

The objective is to generate regionally efficient treatment policies through representative case studies with varying input and output contaminant specifications. For example, for developing countries who suffer from energy crisis, the focus will be on lower energy. The options with low costs, and low energy consumption are further evaluated for sustainability to provide the trade-offs between economics, energy and environmental goals. Eventual goal is to provide systematic information and guidelines to decision makers to design efficient wastewater treatment plants, which are capable of achieving the highest purification levels by preserving the sustainability index and optimized costs.