STUDIES IN CHEMICAL PROCESS DESIGN AND SYNTHESIS: VI. A THERMOECONOMIC APPROACH TO THE EVOLUTIONARY SYNTHESIS OF HEAT EXCHANGER NETWORKS

A thermoeconomic approach to the systematic evolutionary synthesis of energy-optimum and minimum-cost, heat exchanger networks is presented. The proposed approach can be applied by simple hand calculations and graphical manipulations to synthesis problems represented by either heat content diagrams or temperature interval diagrams. Applications of the approach have successfully generated optimum and suboptimum networks of five to ten process streams with much less time and effort compared to previous studies. It is shown that final networks for example synthesis problems can be obtained without performing cost evaluations of intermediate networks during the evolutionary synthesis.