(479b) A Retrofit Model of Water Networks in Industrial Processes

The water/wastewater allocation problem has been largely studied in the last past decades. Different methodologies have been focused regarding mainly what kind of approach the problem is solved (graphical approach or mathematical procedures). However, there is still very few work on methodologies focusing the retrofit problem of these networks. Retrofit projects are widely required in the industrial sector for many and different reasons such as needs of increasing capacity, law requirements for product or byproducts, environmental regulations, among others. The importance of retrofit of water networks in industrial processes from the environmental point of view has been recently highlighted (Nourai et al., 2001; Achour et al., 2005). Thus, the retrofit problem is posed as follows: Given an existing system, what new connections need to be installed and what regeneration process if any is needed (centralized or decentralized), to make the upgrade economically optimal. We will discuss a mathematical programming-based method to solve this problem and we will illustrate with examples.