To solve the problem of energy crisis in today’s world, energy conservation is more and more get the attention of people, heat exchanger occupies an important place in the field of energy saving, however, because of the heat exchanger is a traditional energy-intensive heavy industry, one of the most widely used equipment in it as preheating, mainly in the process of waste heat recovery, refrigeration equipment, made outstanding contributions to energy saving. In this paper, plate heat exchanger as the research object, select the established model, through the analysis of the existing heat transfer enhancement theory, combined with the classical optimization algorithm genetic algorithm plate heat exchanger programming optimization, through iterative calculation to get the optimal plate heat exchanger structure parameters. Finally, combined with the simulation calculation of the performance of the heat exchanger before and after optimization structure parameters, further analysis of its internal flow. The research in this paper provides a theoretical basis for the design, structure optimization and performance prediction of plate heat exchanger.