A review of recent design procedures for water networks in refineries and process plants

Abstract

This paper presents a review of the procedures to design and retrofit water networks. Although the emphasis is in showing results for refineries, the methods are valid for any process plants. It is first shown that the problem has been decomposed into the design of two interacting subsystems. One problem is the freshwater and wastewater reuse allocation and the other is the wastewater treatment problem. It is also shown how the wastewater treatment problem was modeled as a distributed and decentralized treatment. The roadmap towards zero liquid discharge and energy integrated solutions is then discussed. Several solution approaches are briefly outlined emphasizing the main trend leaning towards the use of mathematical programming. The major claim made is that mathematical programming can produce globally optimal solutions and practically important sub-optimal solutions when conceptual insights are employed to build the models. Although the paper intends to be comprehensive, it emphasizes the author's recent work. Finally, a few of the existing challenges of the area are outlined.

Global optimization for the synthesis of integrated water systems in chemical processes

“…A comprehensive review of the various graphical and mathematical programming techniques to design and retrofit water networks is given in Bagajewicz (2000) where the author lists and compares the work done using these two approaches. The author also points out that this area of optimal water allocation and treatment is moving towards the use of mathematical programming techniques, because of the tedious nature of the graphical methods and their severe limitations in handling multicomponent systems.…”

APOGEE: Global optimization of standard, generalized, and extended pooling problems via linear and logarithmic partitioning schemes

“…The pooling problem, an optimization challenge of maximizing profit subject to feedstock availability, intermediate storage capacity, demand, and product specification constraints, has important practical applications to many process systems engineering domains, including petroleum refining, water systems, supplychain operations, and communications [Bagajewicz, 2000, Jeżowski, 2010, Visweswaran, 2009. In petroleum refining, for example, when a variety of feedstocks emerging from distillation units, reformers, and catalytic crackers are combined under limited storage conditions into a plethora of final products with different specifications such as gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation jet fuel, and fuel oil, the global optimum of the pooling problem reports the most profitable hydrocarbon flowrates between the process units.…”

GloMIQO: Global mixed-integer quadratic optimizer

“…, M} Major applications of MIQCQP include quality blending in process networks, separating objects in computational geometry, and portfolio optimization in finance. Specific instantiations of MIQCQP in process networks optimization problems include: pooling problems [5,12,20,28,53,65,66,67,79,93,97,98,100,101,107,137,139], distillation sequences [8,54,58], wastewater treatment and total water systems [9,13,22,29,50,62,71,73,108,109], hybrid energy systems [23,24,49], heat exchanger networks [39,56], reactorseparator-recycle systems [75,76], separation systems [119], data reconciliation [115], batch processes [86], crude oil scheduling [78,80,81,104,103], and natural gas production [82,…”