Why Optimise Heat Exchange Across a Whole Process?

The waste heat recovery course taught you to find a waste heat source, find a nearby thermal load, and check whether supply, demand, temperature and timing all line up. That's the right method for one source and one load. But a real process — a factory, a refinery, a large plant room — has dozens of streams needing heating and dozens needing cooling, all at once. Match them one pair at a time and you'll find some good opportunities. You will not find the best possible answer, and you'll have no way of knowing how far short you fell. Pinch analysis (also called process integration or heat integration) is the method that fixes this: instead of matching streams one pair…