Abstract
A method comprising two steps was developed to judge the feasibility and to determine a running condition when an operating condition is presented for an existing heat exchanger network. One step is to determine temperatures of each process stream at inlet and outlet of each unit by solving a linear programming problem which can be easily formulated from the operating condition and the network structure, and the other is to compare the necessary heat transfer areas calculated from these temperatures with those of the existing network. For a heat exchanger network which has freedom in assigning heat loads to the units, these two steps are repeated if necessary. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by solving example problems.
