Heat exchanger optimized design compared with installed industrial solutions

Commercial software tools for computer aided design of shell and tube heat exchangers are widely used in engineering departments of process plant equipment manufacturers. In this paper a comparison is carried out between actual installed heat exchangers, designed resorting to a leading commercial software tool, and the corresponding equipment configurations obtained by a genetic algorithm-based software tool, developed by the authors for optimal heat exchangers design. Reference is made to a set of four case studies representing exchangers built by a firm operating in the process plant construction sector and designed utilizing the commercial software tool. The corresponding design specifications are then used to redesign the heat exchangers resorting to the above mentioned research tool, and the resulting architectures are compared on the basis of equipment weight, assuming that this is the parameter used by manufacturers to estimate cost. Results show that the research tool, although characterized by a simpler user interface and reduced set of features, consistently delivers superior equipment architectures with significant weight reduction respect commercial solutions, allowing at the same time the compliance with thermal duty specifications. This case study analysis against installed benchmark equipment contributes to validate the developed optimization software tool and shows its capabilities of delivering less expensive heat exchanger designs.