Uncertainty Region Decomposition Approach for Problem of Flexible One-Stage Heat Exchange Network Design

The solving of system synthesis design problems without taking into account the requirement of system flexibility requires the solution of a discrete-continuous problem of nonlinear programming. To ensure the flexibility of the designed system, it is necessary to take into account possible changes in the conditions of its functioning, which leads to taking into account hard or chance constraints and the integral form of the objective function in the optimization problem. This paper proposes a method of uncertainty region decomposition for one-stage heat exchange system design problem, based on partitioning the uncertainty region into sub regions of smaller dimension and size. The resulting sub regions are selected according to the choice of subsets, including one hot stream and one cold stream, from the set of hot and cold streams. In this case, the resulting sub regions are associated only with uncertain parameters related to the change in the properties of flows from the corresponding subset. This will allow us to divide the problem into a set of problems for designing optimal flexible heat transfer subsystems of two flows. In addition, as a result of solving of the subproblems, the values of the effectiveness estimates will be obtained, independent of changes of the uncertain parameters. This will allow us to design an optimal efficient one-stage system of heat exchangers by selecting and combining subsystems with the best performance characteristics.