A comprehensive review of recent advancements and developments in heat exchanger network synthesis techniques

The rapid development of computational technology and the increasing energy demand have improved heat exchanger network (HEN) synthesis. The HEN synthesis involves several optimizations of matches, distributions of heat loads, and stream splitting of heat units. Thus, obtaining good results at high efficiency has been the main standard for evaluating the techniques in the research area of HEN synthesis This paper first summarizes and analyzes the main contributions of the existing HEN synthesis techniques. To compare related data quantitively, information on ten typical cases is presented in this paper. Furthermore, recently improved solutions for commonly encountered existing literature cases demonstrate the evolution and competition trends in the field of HEN synthesis. The comparison data presented in this paper not only provide a useful reference for future research but also present the optimization directions. Based on the findings of this study, it is noted that there is still a large room for improvement, and current approaches are incapable of dealing with all HEN cases. Moreover, it is still difficult to escape a local optimum and overcome structural constraints when seeking the global optimum. As a follow-up to the current work, the parallel computing mode and adaptively coordinating the ratio of global and local searching abilities are major development trends for future investigation.