Heat Exchanger Network Synthesis#

Hot and cold composite curves of a five-stream distillation and flash system converging to a 5 K pinch; the overlap is recovered heat, the overhangs are the remaining hot and cold utility.

hensmith (Heat Exchanger Network Synthesis, Modeling, Integration, Thermodynamics, and Heuristics) is the automated heat exchanger network synthesis facility for BioSTEAM systems: HeatExchangerNetwork is a BioSTEAM Facility that performs a pinch analysis on every heating and cooling utility in a system, synthesizes a network of process exchangers, and reports the utility savings and added capital cost as part of the system’s techno-economic analysis. Watch it run in the Quickstart demo below.

Quickstart#

The canonical example is a small methanol/water system: a shortcut distillation column whose condenser and reboiler are auxiliary exchangers, a cooler on each of the column’s two products, and a flash whose feed is heated by its own auxiliary exchanger. Adding a HeatExchangerNetwork to that system cuts its heating utility by 17.5 % and its cooling utility by 96.8 % with 4 process exchangers, and the network’s installed cost joins the system’s techno-economic analysis like any other unit’s. The interactive demo below runs it end to end: build the flowsheet, add the network, simulate, and inspect the synthesized exchangers and the pinch diagram.

Interactive quickstart demo — open in a new tab.

The quickstart chapter walks through the same example line by line, and the full tutorial continues with the pinch analysis behind it, the anatomy of the synthesized network, and how to configure the network for a larger system.

Getting Started

Tutorials on hensmith

Tutorial

Key Concepts

Pinch analysis and the synthesis heuristics

Key Concepts

API Reference

Every public class and function

API Reference

Contributing

Development, tests, and authors

Contributing

Installation#

Get the latest version of hensmith from PyPI. If you have an installation of Python with pip, simply install it with:

$ pip install hensmith

Note

hensmith requires biosteam>=2.54.0. Until that biosteam release is on PyPI, install the BioSTEAM stack from GitHub HEAD first — the same commands the hensmith continuous-integration workflow uses — and then install hensmith without letting pip resolve its dependencies:

$ pip install --no-cache-dir git+https://github.com/CalebBell/fluids.git
$ pip install --no-cache-dir git+https://github.com/CalebBell/chemicals.git
$ pip install --no-cache-dir git+https://github.com/CalebBell/thermo.git
$ pip install --no-cache-dir git+https://github.com/BioSTEAMDevelopmentGroup/thermosteam.git
$ pip install --no-cache-dir git+https://github.com/BioSTEAMDevelopmentGroup/biosteam.git
$ pip install --no-deps hensmith

To get the git version, use:

$ git clone https://github.com/BioSTEAMDevelopmentGroup/hensmith

Or download directly from the GitHub page.

Importing hensmith binds the facility into biosteam as bst.HeatExchangerNetwork, so import hensmith and import biosteam as bst can be run in either order and bst.HeatExchangerNetwork is hensmith.HeatExchangerNetwork in both.

Citation#

If you use hensmith in your work, please cite it as:

Bhagwat, S. S., & Cortés-Peña, Y. R. (2026). HENSMITH: Heat Exchanger Network Synthesis, Modeling, Integration, Thermodynamics, and Heuristics (Version v0.1.2) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22416033

The pinch-analysis and network-synthesis methodology that hensmith implements follows chapter 9 of:

Seider, W. D., Lewin, D. R., Seader, J. D., Widagdo, S., Gani, R., & Ng, M. K. (2017). Product and Process Design Principles. Wiley. Heat Exchanger Networks (Chapter 9).