Otimização do projeto de trocadores de calor casco-e-tubo empregando programação matemática

Abstract

Heat exchangers are widely used equipment in the process industry and are responsible for heating, cooling, vaporizing or condensing material streams. The classic design of a heat exchanger consists of a trial and error procedure, where the designer, based on his experience, evaluates in a sequential way different equipment alternative, aiming to identify a solution that fulfils the specifications of the thermal service in the best possible way. However, such approach is heavily dependent on the experience of the responsible engineer. For this reason, most currently, many research works have been published proposing design procedures based on optimization algorithms capable of identifying the best solution within the available search space automatically, without the direct intervention of the designer. According to this context, this thesis presents an unprecedented contribution to the literature for the application of optimization techniques through mathematical programming for the determination of global optimum in the design of heat exchangers. From the point of view of scope, this thesis proposal will be focused on services without phase change. Through the application of mathematical programming techniques, formulations of the problem are proposed, taking into account the Kern and Bell-Delaware calculation methods. The first formulation results in an integer linear programming (ILP) problem and the second formulation correspond to a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. The linear character of both formulations allows the identification of the global optimum, even using conventional optimization algorithms. The proposed formulations are capable of identifying feasible solutions for the design of heat exchangers with lower costs than those obtained through the conventional design formulation.