A specific strategy for determination of feasible domain of heat exchanger networks with no stream splitting and its assessment by application of ACOR Algorithm

• Theory of feasible domain for HENs with no stream splitting is developed.
• ACOR are used for HEN synthesis.
• Exchangers are allowed to have any ΔTmin greater than a specified value.
• Comparisons are done with other solutions from the literature.
• Application of ACOR algorithm in the feasible domain provides very good results.

Two of the main obstacles in the procedures for searching of the global optimum answer of an optimization problem are the vast number of local optimums and the complexity of the constraints in the search space of the problem. Most meta-heuristic methods by increasing the exploration of the problem space try to encounter these obstacles. But, by increasing the diversification of the search, the number of infeasible solutions resulting from violation of the constraints increases which leads to enhancement of computational effort. Heat exchanger network optimization problem is known as a problem with complex constraints. In the present work the real feasible domain of the heat exchanger networks with no stream splitting is found while not decreasing the feasible region in order to decrease the computational effort, improve the quality of the final result and to establish a way to compare various results of different algorithms in a fair way. Here, for a specified configuration, after the calculation of feasible domain by the proposed algorithm, the region is sampled by Ant colony optimization in the real number domains to find new exchanger area for a network with specified matches of the streams. Note that, the networks with stream splits will be optimized by removing splits. The examples presented in this work show that the introduced search space is very effective and reduces the computational effort of the optimization algorithm.