An iterative design approach for water networks with multiple regeneration units

Abstract

Design of water networks is one of the research priorities in the sustainable engineering and circular economy field to reduce both freshwater consumption and wastewater discharging flowrate. This contribution introduced an iterative approach to design water networks with several regeneration units. The proposed method include three steps:1) estimating the initial concentrations of the possible regenerated streams, 2) identifying the regenerated streams to be reused, 3) allocating the internal sources and regenerated streams to the demands. The final results can be obtained with several iterations. The presented method can be used for the regeneration units with the models of both fixed removal ratio and that of fixed regenerated concentrations. It is shown that the proposed method in this paper is simple and effective. The design results obtained by the proposed method in this article are comparable to (even better than) that obtained with mathematical programming methods in the literature.