Globally Optimal Design of Kettle Vaporizers

Abstract This article addresses the globally optimal design of kettle vaporizers. Established procedures are heuristics-based trial and verification as well as optimization-based that do not guarantee global optimality. The proposed optimization formulation aims at minimizing heat transfer area; the optimal set of the design variables are the tube length and diameter, number of tube passes, tube layout and pitch, and shell diameter. The problem is solved using Set Trimming, an optimization technique that employs the inequality constraints to gradually reduce the search space until only the feasible candidates remain. After the Set Trimming is performed, the globally optimal solution can be readily found through a simple inspection along the set of remaining viable candidate solutions. This approach has important advantages: it attains the global optimum solution without the need of initial values, there is no convergence drawbacks and it is fast. The performance of the proposed approach is illustrated by its comparison with four different stochastic methods.

[1]  R. A. Smith,et al.  Vaporisers : selection, design & operation , 1986 .

[2]  S. Kakaç,et al.  Heat Exchangers: Selection, Rating, and Thermal Design , 1997 .

[3]  B. V. Babu,et al.  Differential evolution strategies for optimal design of shell-and-tube heat exchangers , 2007 .

[4]  P. A. González-Gómez,et al.  Cost-based design optimization of the heat exchangers in a parabolic trough power plant , 2017 .

[5]  Aline P. Silva,et al.  Optimal Design of Shell-and-Tube Heat Exchangers Using Particle Swarm Optimization , 2009 .

[6]  Hui Han,et al.  Thermal design optimization analysis of an intermediate fluid vaporizer for liquefied natural gas , 2018 .

[7]  Wagner Henrique Saldanha,et al.  State-of-the-Art of Research on Optimization of Shell and Tube Heat Exchangers by Methods of Evolutionary Computation , 2020 .

[8]  Tunde Bello-Ochende,et al.  Entropy generation minimisation of shell-and-tube heat exchanger in crude oil preheat train using firefly algorithm , 2018, Applied Thermal Engineering.

[9]  Viviana Cocco Mariani,et al.  Economic optimization design for shell-and-tube heat exchangers by a Tsallis differential evolution , 2017 .

[10]  Marc A. Rosen,et al.  Techno-economic optimization of a shell and tube heat exchanger by genetic and particle swarm algorithms , 2015 .

[11]  Lester James V. Miranda,et al.  PySwarms: a research toolkit for Particle Swarm Optimization in Python , 2018, J. Open Source Softw..

[12]  Saeid Nahavandi,et al.  Effectiveness of evolutionary algorithms for optimization of heat exchangers , 2015 .

[13]  Dillip Kumar Mohanty.  Gravitational search algorithm for economic optimization design of a shell and tube heat exchanger , 2016 .

[14]  Leandro dos Santos Coelho,et al.  A chaotic quantum-behaved particle swarm approach applied to optimization of heat exchangers , 2012 .

[15]  Hassan Hajabdollahi,et al.  A comparative study on the shell and tube and gasket-plate heat exchangers: The economic viewpoint , 2016 .

[16]  Set Trimming Procedure for the Design Optimization of Shell and Tube Heat Exchangers , 2020 .

[17]  Anand J. Kulkarni,et al.  Adaptive Range Genetic Algorithm: A hybrid optimization approach and its application in the design and economic optimization of Shell-and-Tube Heat Exchanger , 2019, Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell..

[18]  Xuedong Chen,et al.  Thermal design of intermediate fluid vaporizer for subcritical liquefied natural gas , 2016 .

[19]  Robin Smith,et al.  Chemical Process: Design and Integration , 2005 .

[20]  Frank P. Incropera,et al.  Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer , 1981 .

[21]  Viviana Cocco Mariani,et al.  Design of heat exchangers using Falcon Optimization Algorithm , 2019, Applied Thermal Engineering.

[22]  Joel Nothman,et al.  SciPy 1.0-Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python , 2019, ArXiv.

[23]  André L.H. Costa,et al.  110th Anniversary: On the Departure from Heuristics and Simplified Models toward Globally Optimal Design of Process Equipment , 2019 .

[24]  Omid Bozorg-Haddad,et al.  Meta-Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms for Engineering Optimization , 2017 .

[25]  Rajiv Mukherjee.  Practical thermal design of shell-and-tube heat exchangers , 2004 .

[26]  Dillip Kumar Mohanty,et al.  Application of firefly algorithm for design optimization of a shell and tube heat exchanger from economic point of view , 2016 .

[27]  Jorge Andrey Wilhelms Gut,et al.  Optimal configuration design for plate heat exchangers , 2004 .

[28]  Edward Alfred Donald Saunders.  Heat exchangers : selection, design & construction , 1988 .