Design Optimization of Plate-Fin Heat Exchanger Using Sine Cosine Algorithm

Plate-fin heat exchanger (PFHE) is a popular and featured compact heat exchanger, which transfers heat at relatively low-temperature differences and has a high heat transfer surface area to volume ratio. Due to the compact size and light weight, it has been widely used in various engineering areas such as energy, transportation and aerospace. The optimal design of PFHE aims to minimize the economic cost or maximize the efficiency, formulating a mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem which challenges the optimization tools. In this paper, the number of entropy generation units is formulated as the objective functions. Given the strong non-linear behaviors, a recent proposed meta-heuristic algorithm named sine cosine algorithm (SCA) is adopted to solve the problem of the design and optimization of the PFHE and compared with the results of several classical and new algorithms. Test results show that the sine cosine algorithm is the a competitive solver for PFHE optimal design problems.