Optimum design of water-utilize systems featuring regeneration re-use for multiple contaminants

The optimum design of the water-utilize systems featuring regeneration re-use for multiple contaminants is addressed. A global automated optimization design method targeting minimum fresh water consumption, which is based on sequential operation model, is presented, and the mathematical formulation is a MINLP, which can be solved by the computer code based on the hybrid genetic algorithm. This computer code consists of the outer and inner loops: the outer loop is used to optimize the operation sequence based on the adaptive values fed back from the inner loop which is used to optimize the design for a population of given operation sequences. One example is solved to demonstrate the advantage and effectiveness of the new method.