Globally optimal design of air coolers considering fan performance

摘要

Design optimization of air coolers is often presented limiting fan calculations to the required power, without considerations of fan capabilities or commercial viability. In this article, new design optimization procedures are presented to include the selection of a commercial-type fan and, thus, the air flow rate as a variable. The resulting model is a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is solved globally, using three different enumeration procedures, and the performance among them is compared. The proposed approaches are illustrated by two case studies. Results showed that the smart enumeration scheme can provide the global solution in an acceptable computational time even when considering large problems.