Overview
The importance of energy in today’s society is of ever increasing importance given the rising demand for resources and energy. Clearly a mix of the right resources, technologies and practices are needed to meet the energy and environmental demands being placed on ever diminishing resources. A key component of the mix is to improve energy efficiency of the industrial sector. Process integration and pinch analysis (PI/PA) provide a systematic approach at the conceptual design level that helps find ways to reduce the thermal energy needs of industrial processes. To help promote and expand the principles and application of PI/PA a software tool PinCH Version 1.5 has been completed and has been successfully used in industry and in courses. To extend the software capabilities, new features to allow the optimization of time dependent processes such as multiple operating cases (MOC) and batch processes have been added. The optimization maximizes the amount of common area that can be used across all time slices providing a more complete trade-off analysis between energy, area and operational flexibility. Finally, the PinCH software has been enhanced with other specific features agreed upon in collaboration with the product leadership team.
