A review of recent design procedures for water networks in refineries and process plants

This paper presents a review of the procedures to design and retrofit water networks. Although the emphasis is in showing results for refineries, the methods are valid for any process plants. It is first shown that the problem has been decomposed into the design of two interacting subsystems. One problem is the freshwater and wastewater reuse allocation and the other is the wastewater treatment problem. It is also shown how the wastewater treatment problem was modeled as a distributed and decentralized treatment. The roadmap towards zero liquid discharge and energy integrated solutions is then discussed. Several solution approaches are briefly outlined emphasizing the main trend leaning towards the use of mathematical programming. The major claim made is that mathematical programming can produce globally optimal solutions and practically important sub-optimal solutions when conceptual insights are employed to build the models. Although the paper intends to be comprehensive, it emphasizes the author's recent work. Finally, a few of the existing challenges of the area are outlined. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. Aii rights reserved.