Effect of Supertargeting and Non Isothermal Stream Mixing in Heat Exchanger Network Design Using Modified Pinch Analysis

Abstract

This paper investigated the effect of minimum temperature difference as well as that of non-isothermal stream mixing in heat exchanger networks (HENs) using a modified pinch technique. Supertargeting was carried out to determine the appropriate minimum temperature difference value used to design the HENs. The networks were further optimized to remove the isothermal mixing assumption. In the four case studies used in this work, each shows how these two concepts affect the total annual cost (TAC) of HENs. These were presented in the network comparison tables where the cost of the networks using supertargeting is much lower than the cost of the ones without, and the non-isothermal mixing networks have lower costs than the ones with the isothermal mixing assumption even in the networks designed without supertargeting technique.