Zonal Heat Exchanger Model

[dallan-keylogic]

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Presently, the most complex heat exchange model in IDAES is the HeatExchanger1D. While this model can represent a double-pipe heat exchanger, it's difficult to represent more complex (and realistic) flow configurations. What I propose is a "Zonal Heat Exchanger" model.

It would split up shells or tubes into a number of sub-streams, then take an input of a (zone, tube control volume, tube index, shell control volume, shell index) tuple in order to write constraints linking the shell and tube control volumes. This is easier to see with an example:

(Original image from https://engrzone.blogspot.com/2016/10/types-of-heat-exchangers.html)

Here we can split the tubes into 3 parallel control volumes and leave the shell as a single control volume. The order in which the shell and tubes encounter each other is much more complex than simple counter-current flow. Tube CV1 would encounter zones in the order 1, 2,...,7 while the Shell CV would encounter zones 7,14,21,20, etc. By allowing the user to specify which order zones encounter each other, it allows specification of a wide variety of heat exchange configurations.

Ideally this would serve as a parent model for more specific heat exchanger models, which would specify the flow configuration as well as adding performance correlations to specify heat transfer coefficients.