Development platform to evaluate the process control of complex heat exchanger systems

Nowadays, companies operating production facilities have to fulfill many requirements concerning the economic manufacture of products with specified quality covering minimal energy costs and maximum system availability. Especially the last point is relevant for today´s highly integrated systems. Through the coupling of hot and cold product streams in heat recovery systems there often are dependencies of the process streams. One malfunction of a single product stream affecting all the others complicates the process control of production facilities. This is one reason for the reluctance of operating personnel to heat integration projects. This is where this cooperation project draws on.

The aim was to develop a development platform that allows the engineer to efficiently estimate the temporal propagation of a malfunction within the production system in the first stage. Furthermore, in the second stage the platform allows an estimation of the cost that would be necessary to reduce the propagation of the malfunction to a minimum, thus ensure a stable process control.

Partner

XRG Simulation cooperates with the Institute of Process and Plant Engineering, Hamburg University of Technology.

Research Funding

CoHeReNT was supported by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (number KF2629302) and ended in October 2016.