Optimal Synthesis of Batch Water Networks Using Dynamic Programming

Water minimization in the process industry is becoming increasingly important due to increasingly stringent environmental legislation, especially for batch plants. This work proposes a dynamic programming (DP) method for the optimal design of water-using networks in batch plants. DP is a powerful framework for dealing with a large spectrum of multistage decision-making problems and has been applied in numerous chemical engineering problems. The proposed methodology is explained as follows. Firstly, based on the start time and end time of each operation, the whole process is divided into N stages. Secondly, the water requirement of water-using units in each stage is satisfied and the state of stored water and wastewater generation is determined. The backward procedure of DP is used to solve the DP problems. The target of freshwater consumption of the process and the optimal design of the water network are obtained simultaneously. In order to display the versatility of the proposed approach, four examples from literature are considered. Example 1 is a completely batch process with a fixed flowrate problem. Example 2 is a hybrid batch water system comprising various modes of operations and operating patterns. Example 3 is a fixed-mass load problem with a regeneration unit, while example 4 considers the batch water network design with multiple contaminants. The results obtained in this work were comparable with the results from literature, implying that it can be applicable to both mass transfer-based and non-mass transfer-based batch water networks. © 2018, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.