Power and Refrigeration Plants for Minimum Heat Exchanger Inventory

What has been accomplished to date on the question of how to minimize and allocate the heat exchanger inventory in power plants and refrigeration plants is summarized in a table. This table also highlights the three objectives of the present study. The first objective is to devise a much simpler model and analysis to reproduce in closed form Ibrahim et al.'s conclusions for fixed power and minimum UA (total heat exchanger inventory). The second objective is to consider the reverse of the refrigeration problem, and to minimize the total UA while holding the refrigeration load fixed. It will be shown analytically that (UA)[sub H] = (UA)[sub L] is once again a feature of the optimal design, the H and L referring to hot and cold ends of the heat exchanger. The third objective is to minimize the total heat exchanger inventory while holding the refrigerator power input fixed, and to show analytically that (UA)[sub H] = (UA)[sub L]. The overriding objective of this note is to demonstrate in the simplest analytical way possible that power plants and refrigeration plants share a common optimization principle. That principle is that the needed heat exchanger inventory is minimum when it is divided evenlymore » between the two ends of the cycle.« less