C5 Heat Exchanger Networks

1 Introduction

Many process industries are energy-intensive. A large amount of heat energy applied to process streams is normally dissipated through cooling utilities. It is possible to reuse the heat energy of hot process streams for heating cold process streams by means of additional heat exchangers. Such a system is called heat recovery system. The heat recovery system consists of a set of heat exchangers including heaters, coolers, condensers, reboilers, or other equipment and attachments for heat transfer between process streams. It can be treated as a heat exchanger network with different kinds of exchangers in which hot process streams can be cooled by the cold streams to be heated, and vice versa. In this way, the heating and cooling loads from external sources (hot and cold utilities) can be dramatically reduced. However, the reduction in utility costs is often accompanied by the increase in investment costs. Therefore, a balance between utility costs and investment costs...