Experimental and numerical study on the heat transfer and flow characteristics of convex plate heat exchanger based on multi-objective optimization

•A new structure with 2.3∼19.59% performance enhancement is proposed based on MO-optimization.•The Double-layer multi-objective optimization algorithm is applied in the convex plate heat exchanger.•PEC and FSP analysis are used to evaluate the heat transfer and flow characteristics.•An experiment platform is designed for performance exploration and verification.