Design of heat integrated water networks with multiple contaminants

The heat integrated water networks have the features of complex network structure and high costs. To overcome the problems, this paper presents a new design method for heat integrated water networks with simple structure and low costs. The proposed method includes two steps: the water-using network is designed first by considering the concentration specifications of water-using processes, which is reflected by the values of concentration potentials. Then, the heat exchanger network can be designed based on the water network obtained in the first step. Self heating strategy is adopted in the design of heat exchanger network to reduce the complexity of the network. Examples are illustrated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The network structures obtained by using the proposed design method are simple, and the total annual costs calculated in this paper are comparable to that of literature results.