Abstract
Design of Heat Exchanger Networks (HENs) has been widely studied and applied since it can significantly reduce energy consumption in the process industries. However, pressure effects are ignored in HENs. To consider temperature and pressure simultaneously, Work and Heat Exchange Networks (WHENs) emerge as a new research topic in Process Systems Engineering. Even in cases where the supply and target pressures of the process streams are the same, the HENs problem can benefit from being expanded to a WHENs problem. In this paper, a methodology to extend the Heat Exchange Networks (HENs) problem to a Work and Heat Exchange Networks (WHENs) problem is proposed with the objective of improving energy/exergy efficiency of process plants. A case study illustrates the profitability of manipulating the pressure of streams that in the original problem definition are constant pressure streams. The exergy consumption is reduced by 29.92% in the case study. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.