Hybrid Artificial Cooperative Search – Crow Search Algorithm for Optimization of a Counter Flow Wet Cooling Tower

In this paper, an improved version of Artificial Cooperative Search (ACS) algorithm is applied on a counter flow wet-cooling tower design problem. The Merkel’s method is used to determine the characteristic dimensions of cooling tower, along with empirical correlations for the loss and overall mass transfer coefficients in the packing region of the tower.  Basic perturbation schemes of the Crow Search Algorithm, a recent developed metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the food searching behaviors intelligent crows, are incorporated into ACS to enhance the convergence speed and increase the solution diversity of the algorithm. In order to assess the solution performance of the proposed method, fourteen widely known optimization test function have been solved and corresponding convergence histories has been depicted.  .Then the improved ACS algorithm (IACS) is applied on six different examples of counter flow wet-cooling tower optimization problem. The results obtained by applying the proposed algorithm are compared with the results of some other algorithms in the literature. Optimization results show that IACS is an effective algorithm with rapid convergence performance for the optimization of counter flow wet-cooling towers.