Design of regeneration recycling water networks by means of concentration potentials and a linear programming method
Abstract Regeneration reuse/recycling of industrial wastewater can effectively reduce freshwater consumption and wastewater discharge amount. A new method is presented in this article to design regeneration recycling water networks with multiple contaminants. The concentration potentials and linear programming approach are combined for solving the problem of minimization of freshwater and regenerated stream flow rates. The values of concentration potential of demands are utilized to identify the precedence order of water-using processes. The allocations of sources to demands are formulated as linear programming models. To reduce the consumption amounts of high quality source streams, each source stream is assigned a weighting factor based on the quality of the sources. Two examples are solved to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The consumptions of freshwater and regenerated stream obtained by using the proposed method are comparable with those obtained in the literature. The method has the characteristics of converging easily and needing no initial values.