A principle of stream arrangement based on uniformity factor for heat exchanger networks synthesis

•Structure representation for solving HEN with deterministic algorithm efficiently.•A principle under uniformity to overcome the drawback of Modified Powell's Method.•Factor to evaluate the heat flux uniformity of network configuration is presented.•The approach is illustrated by cases: 8SP, 10SP1, 10SP, 14SP1, with better optima.

Heat exchanger network synthesis (HENS) has been one of the most extensively studied synthesis problem in chemical engineering. The methodologies commonly used to solve a heat exchanger network (HEN) problem are based on heuristic methods instead of deterministic methods which, theoretically, only with feasible initial HEN configuration enumeration, can find global optima. But enumeration always leads to unacceptable computational time. This paper presents a principle of process stream arrangement and the related deterministic algorithm for synthesizing HEN. The implementation of the principle based on the uniformity factor which proposed to describe the degree of the energy distribution of HEN configuration under different process stream arrangement is aimed to decrease the space of configuration enumeration. Thus, through the part of smaller uniformity factor network structure are optimized, deterministic methods are effectively suitable for medium-size problem with global optima in a reasonable brief computational time. Notably, using examples of 8SP1, 10SP, 10SP1, 14SP1, we demonstrate that our approach finds superior networks compared to those known in the literature.