An insight-based approach for batch water network with flexible production scheduling framework

Batch chemical plants play an important role in the chemical and pharmacy industry. Efficient water manage-ment is becoming increasingly important in batch production systems because of the stricter environmental regulations and rising costs of water utilization activities. In this work, an insight-based method is proposed to effectively utilize the water in batch chemical plant with flexible scheduling framework. First, Pinch Analysis for continuous process is extended to targeting the freshwater requirement of batch processes. Second, a matrix of source-sink matches is constructed based on insight from Pinch Analysis. Some heuristic rules are defined to select the matches of water sinks and sources in order to reduce the connections and meet the time constraints. Thirdly, initial water network is designed based on the chosen matches and the timing of batch operations is determined based on the water reuse. Four illustrative examples adopted from the literature are investigated based on the proposed method. Results show that flexible product scheduling is useful to reduce freshwater consumption and batch operation time. The proposed method could be used to assist wastewater recovery in flexible batch plant.