In this study, energy and exergy analyses of boiler blowdown heat recovery are performed. To evaluate the effect of heat recovery on the system performance, a steam power plant in Iran is selected and the results of implementation of heat recovery system on the power plant are investigated. Also two different optimization algorithms including GA and PSO are established to increase the plant efficiency. The decision variables are extraction pressure from steam turbine and temperature and pressure of boiler outlet stream. The results indicate that using blowdown recovery technique, the net generated power increases 0.72%. Also energy and exergy efficiency of the system increase by 0.23 and 0.22, respectively. The optimization results show that temperature and pressure of boiler outlet stream have a higher effect on the exergy efficiency of the system in respect to the other decision variables. Using optimization methods, exergy efficiency of the system reaches to 30.66% which shows a 1.86% augmentation with regard to the situation when a flash tank is implemented. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.