SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION OF WAVY FIN CIRCULAR TUBE HEAT EXCHANGER

Abstract

The present study shows the strong ability of a genetic algorithm (GA) in the thermal design and optimization of a herringbone wavy fin and circular tube compact heat exchanger (FTHE). The influences of various design parameters on friction factor, Colburn factor, and minimum total annual cost (TAC) are presented. Mainly, three design objectives are considered, such as minimum friction factor, maximum Colburn factor, and minimum TAC. For optimization, the Optimization toolbox of Matlab is used. In the GA routine, tournament selection, single point crossover, and constraint dependent mutation are adopted. The multiobjective optimization reveals a couple of sets of optimal solutions by optimizing the two objectives, i.e., minimum friction factor and maximum Colburn factor. By minimizing the TAC, a significant amount of cost is found to be reduced as compared to previous works in the literature with some optimum geometrical parameters.