Synthesis of Flexible Heat Exchanger Networks Integrated with Reconfigurable Control Design

Abstract In this work, a new systematic methodology, which extends the synthesis of a flexible heat exchanger network (HEN),proposed by Braccia et al. (2013), with a designing technique of a fully-decentralized reconfigurable control structure(CS) given by Luppi et al. (2014), is presented. The strategy to design the HEN allows the optimal flexible operation inside an expected range of the plant conditions. The CS is done in the context of reconfigurable control structure which are characterized by: (i) the integration of the variables selection task (CVs and MVs) with the corresponding pairings definition (CVs-MVs), (iii) the consideration of scalar indexes to set a rank of the potential solutions. The advantage of the method is that provides alternative control structures able to act at different operating points. In addition, it only utilizes steady-state process information. One example is given in this work to illustrate the potentiality of the proposed methodology and to support the final conclusions.