A heuristic approach to design batch water-using networks with multiple contaminants

Abstract A heuristic design method is presented in this paper for batch water-using networks with multiple contaminants. A systematic procedure is developed on the basis of the performance measures originally used for evaluating the continuous systems. Specifically, the well-established concentration indices, i.e., Concentration Potential of Demand (CPD) and Concentration Potential Source (CPS), are adopted as primary criteria and the time priority as secondary criterion to match the water sources with demands sequentially. For illustration purpose, an example is given at the end of this paper. The results show that this manual approach can be easily implemented to produce a near optimal batch water-using network, which consumes a reasonable amount of freshwater with relatively low level of storage capacity.