The improvement of heat recovery in the industry has traditionally been approached from two different viewpoints – Process Intensification and Process Integration. Many of the developments took the form of Heat Transfer Enhancement or Heat Integration within Heat Exchanger Networks, developing in parallel. In the past decade, however, there have been successful applications of both approaches together, resulting in cost benefits for heat-integrated retrofits. Heat Integration literature has continued to provide a variety of network modelling and retrofit approaches. Recent reviews of the area show that the mathematical-based and thermodynamic-based approaches have reached maturity within the current modelling paradigm. There are indications that the modelling concepts and frameworks need a further step-change to bridge the gap between the solutions to heat recovery problems offered by the current methods and the practical implementation in terms of real retrofit actions, leading to economically feasible reduction of energy use and emissions. The current paper takes these indications as a departure point and reviews the history and the recent developments in the areas of Heat Transfer Enhancement and the retrofit of Heat Exchanger Networks, providing a critical analysis from the viewpoint of obtaining practical solutions with positive cash flows, while minimising the issues related to operability – emissions, flexible operation and control. The analysis clearly shows the need to focus future research and development efforts on increasing model fidelity and practicality, addressing operability issues, and most importantly – development of flexible and efficient tools for communicating optimisation results to industrial practitioners and plant managers who would implement the process retrofit recommendations.

传统上，从两个不同的角度来实现行业中热回收的改进：过程强化和过程集成。许多开发都采用并行开发的换热器网络内换热增强或热集成的形式。然而，在过去的十年中，两种方法成功地一起应用，从而为热集成式改造带来了成本优势。热集成文献继续提供各种网络建模和改造方法。该领域的最新评论表明，在当前的建模范例中，基于数学和基于热力学的方法已经成熟。有迹象表明，建模概念和框架需要进一步的步骤变更，以弥合当前方法提供的热回收问题解决方案与实际实施方面的实际改进措施之间的差距，从而在经济上减少能源的使用和排放。本文以这些指示为出发点，回顾了传热增强和换热器网络改造领域的历史和最新发展，从获得具有正现金流量的实际解决方案的角度进行了批判性分析，而最小化与可操作性相关的问题–排放，灵活的操作和控制。