Wastewater minimisation in multipurpose batch plants with changeover constraints and energy optimisation

Abstract

Water and energy are very necessary resources for operating any chemical plant and contribute to total costs. Economic reasons notwithstanding, the processing industry has been incentivised to practise sustainable production in which the consumption of energy and water are more efficient, in response to stringent environmental legislation and public perception. Published literature exists for the independent investigation of water and energy optimisation in batch plants. It has been established for the individual problems that, a true optimum can only be obtained if batch production scheduling and water use or energy optimisation are performed simultaneously. However, the simultaneous optimisation of both water and energy within the same production scheduling framework has been largely ignored, due to the potential complexities of such a problem. Additionally, literature addressing the minimisation of water in fixed load problems has usually assumed that the water using operations (washing) are sequence independent. This is unlikely, as equipment units usually perform more than one task in multipurpose batch plants. Since the sequence of tasks in a unit influences both the occurrence and extent of washing in the unit, appropriate consideration of task sequences during production can contribute to wastewater minimisation. This thesis presents a mathematical formulation for the production scheduling of multipurpose batch plants, in which sequence dependent changeover costs are addressed. When compared to an existing formulation, the proposed formulation leads to a smaller sized model with fewer binary variables, continuous variables and constraints for a given case study, although the same objective was obtained. Expanding upon this, a mathematical formulation for simultaneous batch production scheduling and wastewater minimisation, for which the water requirement in a unit is dependent on tasks and their successors, is presented. The effectiveness of the formulation was demonstrated using two case studies. The results show improvements in profit and reduced wastewater generation when the sequence of tasks is taken into consideration. One case study saw water savings of 48% achieved with this method. The formulation was extended to incorporate process integration in the form of direct water reuse, which resulted in a further improvement in profit and water use. The third contribution in this thesis is a simultaneous method for the optimisation of energy and water embedded within a scheduling framework. In addition, opportunities for direct and indirect heat integration as well as direct and indirect water reuse were explored with the objective of improving the profitability of the plant while minimising water and external utility usage. The applicability of the method was demonstrated with three case studies. The developed formulation proved superior to a method that solved the same problem sequentially.