Compact and Multi-Stream Heat Exchanger Design

Energy recovery has been playing a major role in most of chemical industries and related fields. A conventional heat recovery system or heat exchanger network (HEN) is usually composed of lots of exchangers. This may lead to extra costs in operation and construction. Thus, this work focuses on designing, optimizing, and applying multi-stream plate-fin heat exchangers (PFHEs) into a HEN to reduce a number of exchangers and costs. The process of doing so starts with synthesis of a conventional HEN. The process stream data used as the case study in this work is taken from a gas separation plant in Thailand. Such network is recognized as the based case which will be improved by replacing some exchangers with PFHEs. The improved network is recognized as the improved case which provides less annual cost than the conventional one around 3 times.