Constrained economic optimization of shell-and-tube heat exchangers using elitist-Jaya algorithm

This paper explores the use of an elitist-Jaya algorithm for economic optimization of shell-and-tube heat exchanger (STHE) design. Three different optimization problems of STHE are considered in this work. The same problems were earlier attempted by other researchers using genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), non-dominated sorting algorithm (NSGA-II) and design approaches motivated by constructional theory. Jaya algorithm is a newly developed algorithm and it does not require any specific parameters to be tuned except the common control parameters. Elitist version of the algorithm is proposed in this paper to optimize the setup cost and operational cost of STHE simultaneously. Discrete variable optimization is also carried out in order to take the advantage of the standard design available for heat exchanger parts. The effect of common controlling parameters e.g. population size, number of iterations and elite size, is tested by considering different combinations of the same. Furthermore, two other case studies of STHE design are considered from the literature and the performance of the elitist-Jaya algorithm is compared with the recently published results. The results of computational experiments proved the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the latest reported methods used for the optimization of the same problems.