Module-based plant design opens up the opportunity for the (bio-)chemical industry to reduce lead times, which is crucial for future competitiveness. Equipment modules are designed once such that they can cover a wide range of process applications and conditions. The time-consuming equipment design step is replaced by selecting the most suitable equipment module from an equipment module database so that engineering work is reused. Although of central importance in module-based plant design, an applicable equipment module database has not been developed, yet. Therefore, it is the aim of this work to develop a methodology for the generation of shell and tube heat exchanger modules for an equipment module database. Existing industrial heat transfer applications are grouped by a hierarchical clustering algorithm. For each cluster of applications a representative heat exchanger is selected. A set of possible representatives is generated in a Sobol sequence from which a heat exchanger is selected to be the representative that covers most of the applications inside the cluster considered. The representative heat exchangers are stored in the equipment module database. The resulting 17 heat exchanger modules can cover 59% of the considered industrial applications despite their considerable diversity regarding conservative operating constraints. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.