A conceptual methodology for simultaneous optimization of water and heat with non-isothermal mixing

Abstract

A new conceptual methodology is proposed to simultaneously integrate water allocation and energy networks with non-isothermal mixing. This method employs a simultaneous model and includes two design steps. In the first step, the water allocation network (WAN), which could achieve the targets of saving water and energy, is obtained by taking account the temperature factor into the design procedure. The optimized targets of both freshwater and energy are reached at this step which ensures this approach is a simultaneous one. In the second step, based on the obtained WAN, the whole water allocation and heat exchange network (WAHEN) is combined with the non-isothermal mixing to reduce the number of heat exchangers. The thus obtained WAHEN can achieve three optimization targets (minimization of water, energy and the number of heat exchangers). Furthermore, the effectivity of our method has been demonstrated by solving two literature examples.