Figure 2 Representation of the lumped model: a) single cell detailed; b) a countercurrent heat exchanger. Tables 1 and 2 describe the geometric charac- teristics of each heat exchanger in the network and Matlab offers an interactive environment through Simulink, which was used in this work. A useful tool in Simulink to solve state equations are the S-functions, which enable the interaction with Simulink equation solvers. It can be defined as a computer language description of a Simulink block that, in this work, is written in Matlab. In Eqs. (1)-(9), “is the heat transfer coefficient, Vis the cell volume, C, is the heat capacity, p is the density, mis the mass flow rate and A; and A; are the shell and tube areas for each cell, respectively. In this work, the HEN model was implemented considering N= 10 in all the heat exchangers.