FAST PROCEDURE FOR HEAT-EXCHANGER NETWORK CHOICES

A fast calculation of a reasonable solution for the choice of a heat e xchanger network able to make some imposed cooling and warming up task s, with the use of auxiliary utilities, is developed in this article. This problem boils down to the internal heat exchanger network choice with respect to a constraint limiting the exchange area, maximizing th e heat recovery and minimizing the number of stream matching. These in ternal matches are made one by one with respect to the tasks to be eff ected at each step. Amongst the possible matches, we have retained the privilegied ones, ie matches saturating a maximum number of constrain ts. Some procedures are implemented so as to choose among this set of privilegied matches. The illustration with some literature problems sh ows that an algorithm made up with these procedures carries out a good compromise between the quality of the obtained solution and the compu ter time.