Inter-Plant Water-Energy Network Synthesis Considering Seasonal Variations
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Date
2019-07-16
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Abstract
Water and energy are required for almost all industrial processes to convert raw materials into value-added products. Natural water and energy resources are experiencing depletion stress mainly due to increasing industrial activities and population growth. Integrated networks are employed in industrial cities as a solution to capture waste water and energy and reutilize them to reduce freshwater and energy production and consumption. Due to increasingly strict environmental regulations, integration networks became essential. Water and energy integration networks play a crucial role in significantly reducing water and carbon footprints. Seasonal variations directly affect the performance of water-energy networks. So far, previous works adopted multi-period planning for designing integration networks capable of handling seasonality issue. Multi-period planning may result in complex optimization models. Also, the developed models are sometimes difficult to be implemented due to spatial constraints on pipelines layout. This work mainly investigates the impact of seasonality on network components. Accordingly, a novel approach for designing interplant water-energy integration networks considering seasonal variations is developed in this work. Seasonality analysis was performed for each network element. Several tools were employed including software packages, empirical correlations, and charts. Analysis results were evaluated to assess the significance of the observed variations. Assessment results indicate that seasonal variations of water/energy supply and demand are insignificant considering the overall system. As a result, some solutions were proposed to design a tolerant water-energy network considering seasonality.
The proposed approach subsumes maximizing network units’ capacities and utility system based on peak conditions. Water-energy network connectivity is determined based on average demand/supply. Maximum capacity freshwater-to-sink connections are enforced to compensate for any seasonal changes in water demands. To balance this out, maximum capacity discharge connections are made available to all water sources. Any water source-to-sink pipeline is designed based on maximum potential flowrate. Also, water network is designed based on worst case scenario considering treatment units’ minimum removal ratios to ensure compatibility of treatment unit-to-sink connections over different seasons. A formulated mathematical model was expanded to include the proposed approach. Finally, a case study was solved using a stochastic programming tool to illustrate the applicability of the developed model.
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Integration networks, sustainability, water scarcity, energy crisis, seasonality