Modeling and optimization of a rinsing process for machinery production

Abstract

A machinery production sector is one of the most important industrial sectors in Thailand. A rinsing process in the machinery production has been considered as a large amount water consumed process. Therefore, to reduce water consumption, most enterprises have carried out the development of rinsing processes but the optimization of these rinsing processes has been rarely studied. This work studies the optimization of a rinsing process in the machinery production to determine the optimal water consumption in the rinsing process. To achieve this, mathematical models of the process have been developed based on mass balances. With these models, simulation study has been carried out to find out the behavior of the process in terms of the concentration of acid and base in rinse water with respect to water flow rate. Then the optimization problem has been formulated and solved using written programs based on MATLAB. The results have shown that the optimal water flow rate is less than the original one of 9.8 percent.