Zero Effluent Methodologies

Overview

Current environmental regulations advocate minimal adverse impact from industrial emissions, including effluent. Ideally, industrial operations should not produce any effluent so as to avoid environmental impact. The mathematical formulations presented in the foregoing chapters of this textbook are aimed at reduction, but not elimination of effluent. The mathematical formulation presented in this chapter deals with a special form of wastewater reuse which has the potential to produce near zero effluent. This special form of wastewater reuse pertains to situations where water constitutes a significant part of the final product as encountered in pharmaceutical and agrochemical facilities. The chapter is structured as follows. The first section provides some background to the operation considered. Section 8.2 describes the superstructure used for the mathematical formulations. The zero effluent scheduling formulation is given in Section 8.3 and the zero effluent synthesis formulation is given in Section 8.4. Section 8.5 presents illustrative examples which demonstrate the application of the derived formulations. Conclusions are given in the final section.