Integration of energy recovery section with thermal desalination systems improves their performance from thermodynamics, economics, and environmental viewpoints. This is because it significantly reduces input energy, heat transfer area, and capital cost requirements. Above all, the system outlet streams can achieve thermal equilibrium with the environment by supplying heat for useful preheating purposes thus reducing the environmental impacts. The plate heat exchangers are generally employed for this purpose as preheaters. The current paper presents a comprehensive investigation and optimization of these heat exchangers for thermal desalination systems applications. An experimentally validated numerical model employing Normalized Sensitivity Analysis and Genetic Algorithm based cost optimization is developed to investigate their performance at assorted operating conditions. The analysis showed that the heat transfer coefficient, pressure drop, and outlet water cost were improved by an increase in feed flow rate. However, with an increased flow rate, the comprehensive output parameter (h/ΔP) decreased due to the high degree increase in pressure drop. Moreover, an increase in the chevron angle reduced the heat transfer coefficient, pressure drop, and water cost. Finally, the optimization lowered the heat transfer area by ~79.5%, capital investment by ~62%, and the outlet cost of the cold stream by ~15.7%. The operational cost is increased due to the increased pressure drop but the overall impact is beneficial as C_total of equipment is reduced by ~52.7%.

从热力学，经济学和环境角度来看，将能量回收部分与热脱盐系统集成在一起可提高其性能。这是因为它显着降低了输入能量，传热面积和资本成本要求。最重要的是，系统出口流可以通过提供热量以达到有用的预热目的，从而与环境达到热平衡，从而减少对环境的影响。为此，通常将板式热交换器用作预热器。本文针对热淡化系统的应用，对这些热交换器进行了全面的研究和优化。建立了使用归一化灵敏度分析和基于遗传算法的成本优化的经过实验验证的数值模型，以研究其在各种运行条件下的性能。分析表明，通过增加进料流量可以改善传热系数，压降和出水成本。但是，随着流量的增加，由于压降的高度增加，综合输出参数（h /ΔP）降低了。而且，人字形角度的增加降低了传热系数，压降和水成本。最后，优化使传热面积降低了约79.5％，资本投资降低了约62％，冷流的出口成本降低了约15.7％。设备_总数减少了约52.7％。