Meeting the needs of a growing population calls for a divergence from linear production systems which are exacerbating finite resource depletion and environmentally degrading emissions. These linear production systems have resulted in the human-driven perturbation of the Earth’s natural biogeochemical cycles and the transgression of environmentally safe operating limits. One solution that can alleviate environmental issues associated with both resource stress and harmful emissions is resource recovery from waste. Specifically, the recovery of resources from food and beverage processing wastewater (FPWW) offers a synergistic solution to alleviate the environmental issues largely associated to the traditional food production system.
Research on resource recovery from FPWW typically focuses on technologies to recover specific resources without considering integrative process systems to recover multiple resources whilst simultaneously satisfying regulations on final effluent quality. This thesis thereby contributes to the literature by bringing a “systems thinking” approach to resource recovery from FPWW by harnessing surrogate modelling and mathematical optimisation techniques to highlight holistic process system designs. A surrogate-based process synthesis methodology is thereby presented to harness high-fidelity data from black box process simulations, embedding first principles models, within a superstructure optimisation framework. A suite of modelling tools is developed to advance the capabilities of the methodology developments and facilitate tailored derivative-free optimisation solutions widely applicable to black box optimisation problems.
The optimisation of a process system to recover energy and nutrients from a microbial protein production wastewater reveals significant scope to reduce the environmental impacts of food production systems. A further application to the recovery of resources from a brewery wastewater demonstrates the capabilities of the modelling methodology to highlight optimal processes to recover carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous resources whilst also accounting for uncertainties inherent to wastewater systems.