Manual design strategies for multicontaminant water-using networks in batch processes

Simple design heuristics are developed in this work to manually generate batch water-using networks with multiple contaminants. The performance indices used for analyzing the continuous systems, i.e., concentration potential of demand (CPD) and concentration potential of source (CPS), are adopted to guide the synthesis steps. Specifically, if the batch plant is operated in cyclic mode, these concentration indices are treated as the primary criteria and the time priority as a secondary issue to match the water demands and sources sequentially. On the other hand, the precedence order of the concentration and time considerations is reversed if it is only necessary to schedule a single campaign. Both the required capacities and the number of buffer tanks in storage facilities can also be determined with the proposed procedures. Finally, two examples are presented at the end of this paper to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed manual approach.