Extension of Pinch Analysis to Targeting and Synthesis of
Multi-Contaminant Material Recycle and Reuse Networks
Abstract
A novel Pinch-based targeting and synthesis procedure in the domain of
multiple constraints (e.g. multi-contaminants) for material
recycle/reuse networks has been developed in this contribution. The main
steps are the identification of the ranking order of material
sinks/demands or sources/supplies. This is dependent on the limiting
contaminants of sinks. Each contaminant/constraint is assigned a Pinch
Diagram (Load vs Flowrate), and the Source and Sink Composite Curves
(CC) are plotted for each diagram. The Source CC should be shifted until
its lines could form a ‘polygon’ with the Sink CC, for which the points
represent the vertices of the polygons. The sequential approach used is
to first identify a preliminary resource target and allocated sources
for each sink, then to follow certain heuristics for further reduction
of the freshwater. The proposed approach provides a minimum resource
target and a network design that achieves the targeted fresh resource
along with graphical representation.