Object-Oriented Model and File Format for Heat Exchanger Network Computations

There have been software packages available for designing, retrofitting and optimising Heat Exchanger Networks (HENs). From those only a handful is available without any charge. Most of them are offered commercially. For professional consultants and large industry such solutions are adequate. However, for researchers they are usually too complicated, not too flexible and expensive. Converting data manually and unifying them in MS-Excel has been practiced to remedy this, but it is time-consuming and leaves a room for errors and semantic mismatch. A step towards a solution of this problem can be an open data exchange file format, which correctly reflects the entities in the HEN domain. The goal of this contribution has been to develop an object oriented model and a prototype file storage format primarily for HEN related tasks. This file format should enable collaboration on simulation, optimisation and synthesis of HENs. It is based on mapping the relevant process units and stream types to object-oriented concepts. An XML-based file format has been derived from the class design to store the topology and relevant data. To test the object model and the file format, a prototype software application has been created.