Thermal design of spiral heat exchangers and heat pipes through global best algorithm

WOS: 000395170800012This study deals with global best algorithm based thermal design of spiral heat exchangers and heat pipes. Spiral heat exchangers are devices which are highly efficient in extremely dirty and fouling process duties. Spirals inherent in design maintain high heat transfer coefficients while avoiding hazardous effects of fouling and uneven fluid distribution in the channels. Heat pipes have wide usage in industry. Thanks to the two phase cycle which takes part in operation, they can transfer high amount of heat with a negligible temperature gradient. In this work, a new stochastic based optimization method global best algorithm is applied for multi objective optimization of spiral heat exchangers as well as single objective optimization for heat pipes. Global best algorithm is easy-to-implement, free of derivatives and it can be reliably applied to any optimization problem. Case studies taken from the literature approaches are solved by the proposed algorithm and results obtained from the literature approaches are compared with thosed acquired by GBA. Comparisons reveal that GBA attains better results than literature studies in terms of solution accuracy and efficiency