Abstract
Optimizing the locations of sewage treatment plants has enormous practical significance. In this study, a large-system mathematical model was developed for optimizing the locations of sewage treatment plants within a system and designing the associated pumping station pipe network. Head loss of pipe segments in the pipe network was the coupling constraint, the economic flow rate of pipe segments was determined by the feasible region constraints of decision variables, and the design variables were the sewage treatment plant locations, the design head of the pumping stations, the pipeline economic life, and the pipe diameter of divided pipe segments. The minimum total annual cost of the sewage treatment plant(s) and the pumping station pipe network was the objective function. A large-system quadratic orthogonal test-based selection method was used with a discrete enumeration comparison and selection method to determine pipeline economic life. A dynamic programming method was used to determine the pipe diameter of the divided pipe segments. By comparing the total annual cost of the sewage treatment plants and the associated pumping station pipe network corresponding to different pipeline economic lifetimes, the optimal solution that generates the minimum total annual cost can be identified. The sewage treatment plant and pumping station pipe network in Taizhou, China, was used as an example to compare and analyze optimization results. The new optimization method would have produced much lower annual cost than that of the existing system. This study provides valuable theoretical references for probing the layout design of urban sewage treatment plants corresponding to different pipeline economic lifetimes.
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This study was supported by the National Science and Technology Support (2015BAB07B01).
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TJD mainly studied the optimization methods of large-scale systems and established mathematical models.
LLY programmed and calculated the mathematical model by computer.
HGF set up the mathematical model of the case, calculated it by computer program, and analyzed the calculation results.
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Highlights
1. This study developed a mathematical model for optimizing the positioning of urban sewage treatment plants and their engineering design of the associated pumping station pipe network, as well as an evaluation of discrete pipeline economic lifetimes. Under a given pipeline economic life, the sewage treatment plant layout and the pumping station design head were optimized by the orthogonal test-based selection method, and the pipe diameter of each divided pipe segment of the pipe network was optimized by the dynamic programming method. By doing this, the theoretically optimal sewage treatment plant layout, the theoretically optimal pumping station design head, and the theoretically optimal pipe diameter of each divided pipe segment were obtained. The optimization results for the sewage treatment plant siting and the pumping station pipe network corresponding to different pipeline economic lifetimes were compared to derive the optimal design siting scheme for the sewage treatment plant and the pumping station pipe network. This optimization method represents a new technique for optimizing the siting of urban sewage treatment plants within a sewage treatment system.
2. The method developed in this study for optimizing the design of the sewage treatment plant layout and the pumping station pipe network engineering does more than determine the optimal locations of sewage treatment plants in a system. The method also identifies the best design head of the pumping stations, ascertains the proper pipe diameter of divided pipe segments, and can also help select pipe materials, further enriching its large-system optimization capability.
3. The method developed in this study to optimize urban sewage treatment plant locations and the associated pumping station pipe network significantly reduces the workload of solutions compared to previous approaches. For the sewage treatment system in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, China, the new optimization method sharply reduced the previous 65,536 test combinations to only 512 by using the orthogonal test. Despite producing a system design that increased the construction cost of the overall system, the proposed method returns clearly identifiable economic benefits by reducing the annual cost of the entire system.
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Tian, J., Lu, L. & He, G. Optimizing the system-wide layout of sewage treatment plants based on enumeration and the orthogonal test. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 26858–26870 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12518-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12518-4