Improving energy recovery in heat exchanger network with intensified tube-side heat transfer

Abstract

Implementing tube inserts, namely tube side enhancement, is an efficient way to increase the heat transfer coefficients of shell and tube heat exchangers, which can achieve substantial energy saving in heat exchanger network (HEN) if suitable retrofit strategies are used (Pan et al., 2011). In this paper, a new optimization method is proposed to consider more details of tube side enhancement for HEN retrofitting, such as multiple tube passes, logarithmic mean temperature difference (LMTD), LMTD correction factor (FT). Even though LMTD and FT will lead to complex nonlinear terms in mathematical programming, the proposed approach can deal with the relevant computational difficulties efficiently. The validity of new optimization approach is illustrated with solving a literature example (Li and Chang, 2010).