Design of spiral heat exchanger from economic and thermal point of view using a tuned wind-driven optimizer

This paper presents an optimization of spiral heat exchangers by wind-driven optimization and a novel variant of this algorithm by the insertion of a statistic distribution to self-adapting of the evolution parameters of the algorithm. Spiral heat exchangers are the ideal type for cooling slurries and fluids that presents high viscosity and is very common in food and petrochemical industries. The variables used for the optimization were the spacing channels for hot and cold streams, the length, the width and the thickness of the heat exchanger. Two case studies were presented where the minimization of the cost and the maximization of the overall heat transfer coefficient were implemented. Reductions about 4.46 and 23% were obtained for the cost and increases about 18.8 and 16.4% were reached for the overall heat transfer coefficient for each case study in comparison to previous works. The proposed technique reached better results in all the simulations, in some cases with GA, but performed better accuracy among all the simulations.