Computer-aided synthesis and design of plant utility systems

A design synthesis procedure is developed for preliminary design of utility systems. Given known steam sources (waste heat and auxiliary boilers) and sinks (heating, process injection, and driver horsepower needs), the algorithm determines the optimal header pressure levels, the distribution of steam turbines in the network, and the steam flows between all devices so as to maximize the real work recovered from the sources. Any number of pressure levels can be accommodated at only modest increase in computational effort.