Some aspects of the modeling of tube-and-shell heat-exchangers

Modern control design of large industrial plants relies strongly on modelling, while experimentation on the real system is extremely limited. The usable model should be intuitive and easily reusable to model potential plant adaptations or similar plants. In this paper some aspects of the modelling a recuperator plant consisting of four heat exchangers are presented. With the object-oriented modelling tool Dymola, using Modelica as a modelling language, the building of clear, intuitive and reusable model of basic, but most important plant’s blocks, heat exchangers is enabled. However, the proposed model of heat exchanger proved to be intrinsically stiff and therefor at the moment problematic to be used as a submodel of more complex models.