Análisis Pinch. Diseño vs Rediseño

Abstract

The design of the heat exchanger networks is a task almost forced for many process engineers. These projects are very important in a wide number of industries. The Pinch Analysis includes a group of tools that allow to design exchanger networks. The objective is to guarantee an efficient use of the energy inside the process industries. However, to retrofit a network in operation following the same procedure for when it is designed, it can cause bad results, because the paid exchange area gets lost.In this paper the conceptual bases are explained, as well as the similarities and differences among the methodologies recommended to approach design and retrofit projects. These strategies are applied to a Cuban refinery of petroleum and two alternatives are obtained. The first one follows the classic procedure of design of a heat exchanger networks and to retrofit the network the used method it is the proposed by Tjoe and Linnhoff. In this method, techniques of optimization are used what allows to eliminate the randomness during the search of the best variants of retrofit. The selected alternative is evaluated keeping in mind technical, economic and environmental approaches.