Structure Optimization for Wide-Channel Plate Heat Exchanger Based on Interval Constraints

Wide-channel plate heat exchanger is a widely-used high performance heat exchanger, and its structure has a significant effect on heat exchange effect. However, the density and flow rate of the heat transfer medium is uncertain, and we only can obtain their possible ranges. Based on this, interval number is introduced to describe uncertainty factor, and then formulate the interval constraint of wide-channel plate heat exchanger. The triangular fuzzy number is employed to define the degree of constraint violation. Due to the difficulty of modeling heat exchange efficiency, its surrogate model is trained by neural network. To solve this issue, multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm is developed to find the optimal structural variable of heat exchanger under uncertain conditions. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm obtains the structure variable of heat exchanger with the most preferable heat effect and lowest cost quickly.