Concentration potential concepts: Powerful tools for design of water-using networks with multiple contaminants

This paper reviews concentration potential concepts and their applications in the design of water-using networks (WUNs) with multiple contaminants. The concentration potential concepts were proposed to determine the concentration order of water streams of multiple contaminants based on the overall allocating possibility of source streams to demand streams on the analogy of single contaminant WUNs. The precedence order of water-using processes, which is crucial for the network design, can be effectively identified by the values of Concentration Potential of Demands (CPDs). The concentration potential concepts, which were originally presented for the water networks of fixed contaminant load model, up to now have been successfully used to design a verity of water-using networks. Computing software has also been developed by combining the concentration potential concepts and linear programming approach. The methods proposed based on the concentration potential concepts have the advantages of simple calculation and clear engineering meaning. The results obtained based on the concentration potential concepts are comparable to that obtained by the literature methods. It is shown that the concentration potential concepts are powerful tools for the design of WUNs with multiple contaminants.