Final Year Project: Plate Fin Heat Exchanger Design Optimization

Energy demand has increased substantially recently, the need of energy efficient equipment in process plants and industries has become a must to stay withing the emission boundaries set by the government. Plate Fin Heat Exchangers (PFHE) are one of the most energy efficient and thermally effective heat exchangers that’s due to their high compactness which makes their surface area density higher than traditional heat exchangers. However, a big issue associated with them is their high cost due to the complexity involved in the manufacturing process. In this project optimization has been conducted to the design of the Plate Fin Heat Exchanger with the objective of minimizing its total annual cost (TAC). However, to ensure that the optimization of the TAC does not come with the cost of lower performance, constraints are added in the objective function to ensure that the pressure drop, flow characteristics of the working fluids and the heat duty of the PFHE are within acceptable boundaries, Optimization of the PFHE will be done using Grey Wolf Optimization Algorithm (GWO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (PSO) , The results obtained from these algorithms will be compared with each other and compared with results obtained by other researches who used different optimization Algorithms with the aim of evaluating the best preforming algorithm in optimizing thermal systems generally and PFHE’s specifically.