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

• Wastewater treatment plant design is a complex multi-faceted problem.
• Process synthesis, modeling, and experiments are important components for industrial wastewater treatment plant design.
• Experiments complement heuristics-based flowsheet development.
• Experiments are particularly important for plant design of highly varied industrial effluents

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.