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200 Membranes for lndustrial Wastewater Recovery and Re-use
consortium which provides the latest information on the latest developments
regarding the methodology itself.
Apart from the commercial software tools, several researchers have developed
their own software tools, mainly from the mid-1990s onwards. This has arisen
as much out of financial prudence as much as anything else, since commercial
packages are both expensive and limited in that they do not allow the algorithms
to be adapted. The simulation tool Matlab has been used by the Pollution
Research Group at the University of Natal to formulate the problem and to design
the water network in a power plant (Brouckaert et al., 2002). This formulation
has been adapted by Majozi (1999) for batch processes. The group is also using
this approach to optimise reagent recovery and water use in industrial processes.
The software tool developed by the group to this purpose has yet to be
commercialised (Giannada et al., 2002).
At the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg a water pinch software
package, Wade@?, was developed with emphasis on the treatment system
including the selection of reasonable treatment operations for purification
(or regeneration) purposes (Ullmer et al., 2002). A software package
(WaterDesign) for calculating minimum water usage for a single contaminant
problem was provided along with a textbook (Mann and Liu, 1999). A
Portuguese research group has developed its own software in using Microsoft
Visual Basic, implementing the methodology of Wang and Smith (1994) with
improvements including multiple pinch analysis, regeneration reuse targeting,
taking into account water purification technology (Castro et al., 1999).
According to the authors' article, the software is continually under
development. At the University of Oklahoma the pinch concept was extended to
account for heat and mass exchanger networks (Bagajewicz, 2002). Many other
research groups and independent research institutions, such as CEVI in
Denmark (Anderson et al., 2002), have produced their own CAD packages, and it
is most likely that at least some of these will be commercialised at some stage.