Improving energy efficiency of the process in many cases starts with a heat exchanger assessment. Very often heat exchange performance deviates from the optimum. Pinch method is a good and efficient way to evaluate, analyze and improve energy efficiency of the unit.

More and more new businesses emerging in many fields and professions, bringing out all kinds of ideas and solutions. While at the same time, there is less activity and less new businesses developing in the field of chemical engineering.While the world needs as many as possible – new ideas for improved environmental protection, climate problems, innovations in optimal waste management, improved solutions for optimal and efficient energy use, reduced emissions, sustainable development of technologies and products and many more…

With the increase in the cost of energy, the ability to optimize the use of resources, and in particular of energy, is becoming an extremely important skill for chemical engineers. Optimal integration of energy has a major role for every process unit. Systematic methods for optimal energy integration are well established in the framework of pinch - point analysis.

Process simulators, which initially were used for material and energy balances, are now used by process engineers for a number of important activities, including process design, process analysis, and process optimization. However, because of often very large number of equations, problems in computational efficiency and solution reliability may occur causing inconsistencies in the closing of material balances. The closing of material balance is also a big challenge in industrial processes and can help to determine faulty sensors.

If you are just a beginner in process simulation with the aim to get perspective on modeling of heat exchangers, a process engineer involved with energy efficiency project looking to find out more information about the calculation details, or you are involved with operational problems of your plant and would like to gain more information and be able to analyse and solve operational problem, this article might give you some insights on how to approach the heat exchanger analysis.

Process design is an activity that brings the industrial process from idea to reality! Before the process design can be started, the problem must be formulated and goals of the product defined. After this step is done, further activity goes to analysis and the definition of the process flowsheet that will be constructed. Sometimes, the design goal might be to make a choice whether to build a new process or to reconstruct the existing one.