SIMULATED ANNEALING TECHNIQUE TO DESIGN MINIMUM COST EXCHANGER

Owing to the wide utilization of heat exchangers in industrial processes, their cost minimization is an important target for both designers and users. Traditional design approaches are based on iterative procedures which gradually change the design and geometric parameters to satisfy a given heat duty and constraints. Although well proven, this kind of approach is time consuming and may not lead to cost effective design as no cost criteria are explicitly accounted for. The present study explores the use of non-traditional optimization technique called simulated annealing (SA), for design optimization of shell and tube heat exchangers from an economic point of view. The optimization procedure involves the selection of the major geometric parameters such as tube diameters, tube length, baffle spacing, number of tube passes, tube layout, type of head, baffle cut, etc., and minimization of total annual cost is considered as the design target. The presented simulated annealing technique is simple in concept, few in parameters and easy for implementations. Furthermore, the SA algorithm explores the good quality solutions quickly, giving the designer more degrees of freedom in the final choice with respect to traditional methods. The methodology takes into account the geometric and operational constraints typically recommended by design codes. Three different case studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of proposed algorithm. The SA approach is able to reduce the total cost of the heat exchanger compared to cost obtained by the previously reported GA approach.