Thermal-economic optimization design of shell and tube heat exchanger using an improved sparrow search algorithm

•A full-dimensional thermal-economic model is constructed for STHEs.•An improved method is proposed for single-multi objective optimization of STHEs.•The optimization results are highly competitive with the reported global optima.•Superior to original design and other metaheuristics on optimized results and time.•Total cost is reduced by 53.73% and effectiveness increases by 2.33%.