(425b) Process Design of Wastewater Treatment Plants for Textile Effluents

Textile industry consumes a humongous amount of fresh water, depleting a valuable resource required for everyday human activities. In addition, wastewater effluents loaded with pollutants often pose significant risks to the environment. It is therefore important to have high-performance and low-cost wastewater treatment plants to treat and reuse textile wastewater. Despite its importance, many wastewater treatment plants are still designed based on experience, leading to high consumption of chemicals, plant failure in the presence of disturbances and inappropriate selection of wastewater treatment techniques such as coagulation, adsorption, biotreatment, Fenton reaction, ozonation, multi-media filtration, membrane filtration, etc.

An integrated design method has been formulated for the systematic development of a wastewater treatment plant. Textile effluents are first characterized to provide basic information for process design. Heuristics are used to guide the designer to come up with a preliminary design. Design and operating parameters of the wastewater treatment plant are then determined based on bench-scale experimental testing. Finally, various flowsheet alternatives are evaluated to select the optimum process flowsheet using a simulation code. The workflow among various stakeholders to reach the final design is also discussed. Industrial examples are presented to illustrate the design method.