Optimal design of distributed wastewater treatment networks

This paper deals with the optimum design of a distributed wastewater network where multicomponent streams are considered that are to be processed by units for reducing the concentration of several contaminants. The proposed model gives rise to a nonconvex nonlinear problem which often exhibits local minima and causes convergence difficulties. A search procedure is proposed in this paper that is based on the successive solution of a relaxed linear model and the original nonconvex nonlinear problem. Several examples are presented to illustrate that the proposed method often yields global or near global optimum solutions. The model is also extended for selecting different treatment technologies and for handling membrane separation modules.