Optimal synthesis for retrofitting heat exchanger network

During the past two decades, a lot of researches have been done on the synthesis of grassroot heat exchanger networks(HEN). However, few have been dedicated to retrofit of existing heat exchanger networks, which usually use more amount of utilities (i.e. steam and/or cooling water) than the minimum requirements. This excess gives motivation of trades-off between energy saving and rearranging investment. In this paper, an algorithmic-evolutionary synthesis procedure for retrofitting heat exchanger networks is proposed. It consists of two stages. First, after the amount of maximum energy recovery(MER) is computed, a grass-root network featuring minimum number of units(MNU) is synthesized. In this stage, a systematic procedure of synthesizing MNU networks is presented. It is based upon the concept of pinch, from which networks are synthesized in a logical way by the heuristics verified by the pinch technology. In the second stage, since an initial feasible network is synthesized based on the pre-analysis result of MER and must-matches, an assignment problem between new and existing units is solved to minimize total required additional areas. After the existing units are assigned, the network can be improved by switching some units. For this purpose, an improvement problem is formulated and solved to utilize the areas of existing units as much as possible. An example is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.