(477f) Agile Multiple Water Network Designs for Soluble Contaminant Transport Identification and Site Remediation

Water network design (WND) is widely studied and employed in many industrial processes to minimize freshwater consumption and wastewater generation.  Previous studies have been focusing almost exclusively on identifying one optimal WND for a studied process system.  Actually, the quest for agile manufacturing by some multi-purpose industrial processes needs a comprehensive WND having the maximum operational flexibility to deal with various production requirements.  Thus, the most desirable way for such agile operation is to couple various WNDs into one super design, and then through an effective control strategy to accomplish different production requests by switching among these WNDs. However, this has added the difficulty in contaminant transport identification once the network has been exposure to soluble hazards. In this paper, a novel methodology for the design of such a flexible super WND has been developed.  It simultaneously considers the integration of multiple WNDs,  network control switch based on different purposes and soluble contaminant transport identification in order to target timely site remediation.  The objective of this optimization problem is a super WND coupled with all the recipe-based WNDs; the number of regular and three-way valves needed for the super WND; the optimal design of all of the valve placements in terms of the minimum total valve-switching times (TVST) to swap one pair of WNDs at a time; the control strategy (valve opening/closing strategy) to switch among WNDs in order to identify contaminant transport and  reduce/terminate its further impact.  The developed systematic methodology is general and thus applicable for many potential network integration problems. Case studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the development and its significance in the context of agile operation.