Environmental and Economic Sustainability Evaluation for Design Improvement and Optimization of Ion Exchange Drinking Water Treatment

Water treatment infrastructure faces numerous operational, financial, and environmental challenges. Implications of design choices on environmental impacts and costs at full-scale implementation are often poorly understood or evaluated. Furthermore, as new facilities are constructed and designs adopted, the implications of design choices gain importance. Ion Exchange (IX) is a robust technology that can be used to remove various types of contaminants in drinking water and has shown increased adoption for applications such as disinfection byproduct precursor removal.  Through this research the sustainability of IX technology has been evaluated and utilized to target design improvements. This evaluation is being used to develop a framework for technology improvement and optimization of water technologies by dynamically linking a mathematical process model with environmental and economic assessment, using a case study of IX. This model and framework allow for multi-objective optimization of design parameters to minimize environmental impacts and costs of water treatment technology.