Convegni ATI - Accesso riservato soci CTI

Autore: S. Mastromanno, J. Petrucci, E. Sciubba

Collana: CA - 60 - Roma 2005

Note:
The present paper describes the further development of an Expert System for the design and optimization of Heat Exchange Networks (HEN). The code described herein, HENEA (from Heat Exchanger Network Expert Assistant) is a Knowledge Based System capable of interacting with a Process Engineer to generate an optimal configuration for a HEN under several different objective functions. Contrary to most of the currently available
methods, it is able to produce such solutions by making explicit use of a set of Second Law Analysis criteria and of some of the basic principles of the “Pinch Method”. With respect to the previous version, HENEA includes an additional application, "HEN-SPLIT", that accounts for the possibility of splitting one of the streams according with some “minimal entropy generation” criteria not included in the previous version. In its present version, HENEA can be used both for process design (new HEN) and for process structural optimization (retrofit problems). The process of optimization is based on Sama’s “Second Low Insight Method" and is directly and explicitly finalized to the reduction of the global entropy generation.
The code is also endowed with a cost calculations utility, and can be thus employed to search for the optimum using two alternative optimization criteria: it generates in fact both a Maximum Energy Recovery (MER) and Minimum Exchange Area configuration (MCC, Minimum Capital Cost).
Since the code is though for practical industrial use, and it is well known that a thermodynamically optimal configuration is not always the “most convenient” one from an engineering point of view, HENEA presents to the user also a certain number of additional sub-optimal configurations.