Fuzzy Optimal Design of the Plate-Fin Heat Exchangers by Particle Swarm Optimization

Plate-fin heat exchanger has been widely used in chemical, mechanical and electronic engineering etc. The optimal design of PFHE is an important method to improve the performance of PFHE. According to the engineering requirements, the minimum weight, higher heat efficiency and reasonable pressure loss are set as optimal objectives of PFHE, which is termed as multi-objective optimal problem. To implement the multi-objective optimal design of PFHE, fuzzy optimization technology by particle swarm optimization is developed, in which the fuzzy factors are dealt with as membership functions. A numerical engineering example of PFHE is given to examine the validity of the proposed fuzzy optimization approach, the results compared with one by trial-and-error process show that the optimal PFHE has better synthetically performance than the one designed by trial-and-error process.