Computer Aided Selection of the Suitable Treatment Strategy for Industrial Waste Water Utilization and Reuse

• Main Author: Malek I. Alahmad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2010-07-01
• Series: Journal of King Saud University: Engineering Sciences
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S101836391830494X

In Saudi Arabia, the request for water is increasing annually to fulfill the development requirements in the field of drinking, agriculture and industrial sectors. The only water sources available for these requirements are desalted seawater, which is costly and underground water with its renewal limitations. Hence, more attention has to be given to both wastewater treatment and utilization. Various types of wastewater treatment processes are available in the literature, but most of them are applied to a certain application and a certain waste. No general strategy of treatment appeared in the literature of this field.In the present work, a design for reliable flow sheet that can handle various industrial and domestic wastewaters has been attempted, and a computer program was developed to enhance the best selection of the suitable treatment strategy for any given wastewater. The program can also deal with more than one type of wastewater stream containing various pollutant concentrations and have different flow rates. The program can also give more than one product from the processed waste and calculates the cost of the produced water in each case.Moreover, sensitivity analysis runs were carried out to investigate the response of the present program to any expected or sudden changes in the influent streams and it was found that it can give directly the proper action for the treatment strategy in each case. Keywords: Water reuse, Wastewater treatment, Flow-sheet and process selection