Design of industrial wastewater treatment plants: a multi-faceted problem

Process synthesis, modeling, and experiments are the major components in designing industrial wastewater treatment plants. As industrial wastewater contains process-specific pollutants and is highly varied in nature, limited information is available in selecting the best treatment unit for a given industrial wastewater by heuristics. Experiments can complement the heuristics-based flowsheet development by determining the best treatment unit for the industrial wastewater and obtaining model parameters for a more reliable process simulation. This finally leads to a high performance and cost effective industrial wastewater treatment plant.