Abstract
Traditionally, pinch analysis assumes a complete freedom of design when it comes to connecting different streams with each other. The characteristics of the streams, such as heat capacity flow and the start and target temperatures, are treated as constant, regardless of the chosen match. However, if the hot flows have a composition of different components, of which some have a condensation temperature on the range in question, this assumption does not always hold. For streams like this, the end temperature and the total enthalpy given by the stream are dependent on the stream on the other side of the heat exchanger and a simple temperature difference is not sufficient to describe the situation. Typical examples of streams of this kind are moist air and other mixtures of several gases.
In this paper, the previously presented novel approach for including multi phase flows into pinch analysis will be studied further using a set of new examples. The examples include a theoretical simplified analysis to highlight the significance of the novel approach, and a discussion of the importance of the findings in industrial examples.
The results show that the methodology gives new insight to the relevant possibilities for heat recovery from multi phase streams.
