Synthesis of heat recovery system with heat pumps

Heat recovery systems (HRS) combine heat exchanging and heat pumping to decrease energy demand and improve energy quality, respectively. The synthesis of such a system involves configuring heat exchangers and heat pumps into a network. The problem is more complex than that of conventional heat exchanger synthesis problem, because of a combinatorial nature in properly selecting of heat pump matches (HPMs) and heat matches (HMs). In this work, an evolutionary approach is developed by interactively searching for design variables into total cost effect. The method consists of an initial HRS and neighboring alternatives generation. In the initial generation, a thcrmodynamic priority is considered to introduce a most preferable configuration of HPMs into the network. In alternative generation, alternative configurations of HPMs are repeatedly introduced to obtain an optimal HPMs as a search variable. An algorithm is proposed to find efficiently the best HRS and its effectiveness is demonstrated through an illustrative example problem.