Patent ID: 8311682

Claim:
A method to synthesize a grass-roots heat exchanger network for a plurality of hot process streams to be cooled and a plurality of cold process streams to be heated and to identify optimal heat exchanger network topology for future retrofit to accommodate future time-dependent new operating modes, disturbances and uncertainty schemes, the method comprising the steps of: determining a first heat exchanger network design by a computer responsive to a first set of a plurality of stream-specific supply attribute interval values associated with a corresponding plurality of process streams; determining a plurality of additional heat exchanger network designs by the computer responsive to a corresponding plurality of additional sets of stream-specific supply attribute interval values associated with the plurality of process streams, at least one interval value of at least one member of the first set of stream-specific supply attribute interval values being different than a corresponding at least one interval value of a corresponding at least one member of each of the additional sets of stream-specific supply attribute interval values associated with a corresponding same one of the plurality of process streams, at least one interval value of at least one member of each one of the additional sets of stream-specific supply attribute interval values being different than a corresponding at least one interval value of a corresponding at least one member of each other of the plurality of additional sets of stream-specific supply attribute interval values associated with a corresponding same one of the plurality of process streams; and identifying a set of a plurality of common-structure heat exchanger network designs extracted from the plurality of additional heat exchanger network designs and the first heat exchanger network design to thereby facilitate user selection of a heat exchanger network satisfying both current user-selected economic, switchability, and flexibility criteria and anticipated potential future retrofit requirements, each of the plurality of common-structure heat exchanger designs having a network structure comprising a common process-to-process heat exchanger structure that is substantially the same as that of each other of the plurality of common-structure heat exchanger designs but collectively different in load allocation therebetween.