New Approach for Designing an Optimum and Flexible Heat Exchanger Network

It is significant to study and improve the flexibility of chemical plants. The flexibility defined as the capability to operate this plant over a range of conditions under external disturbances or inherent uncertainty while satisfying performance specifications by convenient control variables adjustment. The target of this work is to introduce a new approach for designing optimal flexible HEN in a similar fashion of multi-period design depending on similar period durations of worst operating conditions. These worst conditions lie within the uncertainty range in terms of extreme heat load requirements to decrease number of exhaustive iteration and enhance flexibility index from the first design step.