Designing the Heat Exchanger Network10 / 17
The Tick-Off Heuristic & Stream Splitting
Building a workable network match by match, and when a stream must be split to keep every match feasible.
10 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead · Last reviewed July 2026
The previous lesson's network was simple because there was only one hot stream and one cold stream to match. Real processes have several of each on a side of the pinch, and two problems appear that a single-pair match never faces: which stream do you match first, and what do you do when the feasibility rule says no pairing works?
In this lesson
- 01The tick-off heuristic
- 02When no match is feasible: splitting
- 03Choosing the split ratio
- 04Sources and further reading