화학공학소재연구정보센터
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.59, No.33, 14834-14849, 2020
A Flexible Model with an Adjustable Number of Nodes for Efficient and High-Quality Heat Exchanger Network Synthesis
Obtaining precise and efficient solutions of large-scale cases is one of the main obstacles of heat exchanger network synthesis (HENS) technologies. Due to the absence of abundant local minima in the solution domain, searching a sufficient solution domain and decreasing the amount of calculations are two vital tasks for finding a globally optimal solution for HENS. In order to address the above-mentioned problems, a flexible model with an adjustable number of nodes is developed in this paper. In the premise of sufficient solution space, the developed model dynamically adjusts the number of calculation nodes during the optimization process based on the current configuration. The effectiveness of the developed model is demonstrated and verified using four large-scale cases with different conditions. The obtained results demonstrate that the optimal solutions produced by the proposed model for cases 1-3 with stream splits are 0.16, 0.34, and 2.97 better, while for cases 3-4 without stream splits are 0.1 and 0.6% better than the best optimal solutions reported in the literature, respectively. Moreover, the computational times for cases 1-3 are 29.5, 44.86, and 51.8% lower, while for cases 3-4 without stream splits are 25.20 and 25.24% lower than the ones without the proposed method, respectively. In addition, the overall computational efficiency of the proposed model can be improved by a maximum of 51.8%.