Abstract

This study explores the application of Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) in thermodynamic optimization of a cross-flow plate fin heat exchanger. The optimization aims at finding the minimum number of total entropy generation units under a given heat duty and pressure drop constraints. Seven design parameters namely, hot side length, cold side length, fin height, fin frequency, fin thickness, number of fin layers for hot side and offset-strip length are chosen as optimization variables. The constraints are handled using penalty function. To better understand the algorithm, a case study from the literature is presented. The results show that ICA can find better results comparing to traditional genetic algorithms.

Key words: Optimization, plate fin heat exchanger, evolutionary algorithms, imperialist competitive algorithm.