ABSTRACT
Water is precious and a vital commodity for survival of society and industries in general. This chapter focuses on mathematical programming-based approaches for continuous processes. The freshwater resources are continuously depleting due to rapid industrialization and there is increasing water demand due to rising population growth. Thus, there is increased concern for water conservation either through rainwater harvesting or by minimizing freshwater requirement by strongly encouraging reuse and recycle of wastewater for other useful purposes at domestic, urban, and industrial scales. Water network synthesis approach can be applied for water conservation either for grassroot synthesis and design of new processes or for retrofit of existing processes. The different approaches for water network synthesis problems can be broadly classified as pinch analysis-based or insight-based methods and mathematical programming-based techniques. The optimal water network synthesis problems are discussed for reducing the total freshwater consumption rate of single- contaminate and multicontaminate systems in fixed-load and fixed-flow rate operations.
