Water Recycle and Reuse Software Design

Recycling industrial process water increases the efficiency of water use, resulting in both freshwater conservation and raw material cost efficiency.  Thus, designing networks for allocating and recycling process water is a key competency for chemical engineering students.  Software was designed with MATLAB® and Simulink® as a tool to aid in solving industrial-scale problems.  Generating visual tools for designing networks, the program includes a graphical user interface, graphical stream matching, a safety analysis module, and an economic analysis module.  For a given set of process water sources and sinks, the program identifies the thermodynamic maximum for water recycle with a material recycle pinch diagram.  The program also generates a mass-mapping diagram that presents the relative flow rates and concentrations of all streams.  Within an interactive block diagram interface, the user matches sources of process water for recycle to sinks while considering safety and operations constraints.  The program indicates progress towards maximum recycle and provides residual diagrams to guide further network design.  The economics module enables comparison of networks, and the safety analysis module guides the user through a hazard and operability study.