A water network optimization using MATLAB—A case study

The methodology of mass and energy integration is widely applied for reduction of water consumption, which belongs to the area of mass integration, and is also energy integration problem if water is considered an energy source (cooling water and steam). This work presents a study of water-consumption reduction through optimization of the process superstructure. A petroleum refinery water network was analyzed and a solution is proposed to minimize the costs of fresh water and wastewater treatment. Three processes which use water, with three contaminants, were monitored and three potential treatment units are proposed. The procedure was based on relaxation of a non-convex non-linear programming problem into a mixed integer linear programming (MILP). The MILP model was further simplified using heuristic rules and solved by using MATLAB.