(568i) Dynamic Control of Multiple Water Networks for Agile Manufacturing

Water network design (WND) is of great importance to effective use of valuable water, which plays key role in not only the reduction of freshwater, but also the curbing of wastewater generation. While extensive researches have been conducted for WND, there is a lack of systematic studies on dynamic controls among multiple water networks for producing multiple products from one single production line.  This agile manufacturing way shows great potential for future chemicals productions bearing enormous flexibility and profitability.   In this paper, a systematic methodology for such a study has been developed.  Firstly, a super WND will be optimally obtained, which structurally integrates multiple WNDs for manufacturing multiple products according to their processing recopies.  Next, a dynamic control strategy will be developed to optimize the dynamic status transition between any two WNDs. It involves a dynamic optimization problem, which has two objectives: the first is to minimize the dynamic transition time from one WND to another; the second is to minimize the quantity of freshwater and chemical consumption as well as wastewater generation during such transitions. This methodology can be adopted to handle dynamic shift operations among multiple production recipes with the minimum design and operational costs.