The Water Pinch Model for Reusing Copper Processing Waste Water using Two Pollutants Simultaneously

Today, reducing waste water as one of the greatest challenges we face in the industrial process and, since the wastewater is one of the major pollutants produced in that process, the ability to restore and reuse water and to reduce water consumption represents an important step towards overall waste water reduction. This article investigates the minimization of water consumption and wastewater in the copper industry and, specifically, in Unit Three of the Khatoon Abad copper complex. One conventional method and one new method named Water Pinch are described for this purpose. In the first, second and third modes, respectively, the TSS-TDS, Turbidity-TDS and TSS-Turbidity parameters were considered as the indicators. The results showed a saving in raw water consumption of 379, 22 and 401 m3/day (equal to 25, 1.46 and 26 %), respectively, which is a significant amount.