An Optimization Method of Heat Exchanger Network for Non-Fixed Investment Costs

In order to overcome the difficulty of easily falling into the local minimum solution during the optimization process of heat exchanger network which is not considered fixed investment costs, an innovative method was presented. The total areas of local minimum solution were distributed equally, and then the distributed areas were assigned to initial areas for further optimization. The better local minimum solution was sought out after jumping out of local minimum solution. Through some case study, it presents that this optimization method is able to obtain better optimization results which is more suitable to industrial applications.