Heat integration incorporating leakage risk assessment of heat exchanger networks

Abstract

Heat exchanger leakage leads to the shutdown of the whole set of equipment, which affects the economy of the production and directly threatens the safe operation of equipment. This contribution aims to add a quantitative leakage risks characterisation of including or excluding specific process streams into the dataset for Heat Integration (HI). This has been achieved by formulating a mathematical model of the HEN, where the objective function contains leakage risk assessment embedded into the total cost, based on risk severity and mean occurrence frequency. Equations for investment calculation are linearised, and a novel iteration algorithm is developed to solve the model. A sensitivity analysis of the resulting cost against the levels of potential risk is performed. The results show that there is a turning point with the increase of risk level that changes HEN topologies. It allows engineers to use a quantitative criterion for HI.