Water Reuse and Wastewater Minimization in Chemical Industries Using Differentiated Regeneration of Contaminants

There is currently a great demand for tools that allow the analysis of water networks in a practical and objective way. In the modern scenarios chemical industries need to consume water in more rational forms to minimize the risk of water scarcity caused by pollution. Some of the alternatives for reducing water consumption involve the reuse and/or recycling of wastewater, such as the methodology based on the water source diagram (WSD), which is a flexible and dynamic alternative approach to generating viable scenarios for the management of water networks. In this study the implementation of the WSD to support the optimization software (GAMS) in a process of differentiated regeneration is studied, treating the operation of a chemical process of interest in an objective and systemic way. The method can be applied to resource networks with multiple impurities, even when the utility contains impurities. The possibilities for maximum reuse of water and differentiated effluent regeneration are studied, aiming to minimize the total flow of wastewater being treated inside the treatment units and the global cost of the network. The application of this methodology is illustrated through two case studies. The results show that this procedure allows the successful identification of different scenarios which present a condition of minimum water consumption together with a minimum network operation cost.