The failure of heat exchangers is an acute problem being experienced by chemical process industries. The loss of containment from this failure can cause enormous destruction and monetary loss in industries. The failure frequency of the heat exchanger network can be substantially improved through the inherently safer design. Moreover, integration between process design stages with risk and consequence estimation is extremely important in order to design inherently safe heat exchanger network. However, the lack of formal integration between process design stages with risk and consequence estimation results in the unproductive estimation of risk levels and consequences. Few studies on the integration of risk estimation with process design are available, but a viable framework is required to lay out the inherently safer heat exchanger network. Hence, based on the highlighted issue, application of integrated risk estimation tool (iRET) is proposed for designing the inherently safe heat exchanger network in the preliminary design stage. © 2016 The Authors.