Efficiency and economic optimization of shell and tube heat exchanger using bacteria foraging algorithm

Abstract

Shell and tube heat exchanger (STHE) is widely used in the industries for various purposes due to its capacity to withstand pressure. STHE has the drawback of more cost and lower efficiency. Many existing methods involve in applying the optimization technique to decrease the cost of the system. Existing method has the lower efficiency in the optimization due to the random initialization and poor convergence. This research applies the bacteria foraging algorithm (BFA) to increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of the STHE system. The BFA has the advantages of the faster convergence and the global search approach to increase the performance in design. The proposed BFA is evaluated in the two case studies and compared with the existing method. The proposed BFA in multi-objective optimization of STHE has the total cost of 41,464 €, while existing method has the total cost of 41,913 €. The proposed BFA method also achieved high heat efficiency coefficient of 1089, and the existing method has 1031.47.