Heat Exchanger Network (HEN) synthesis is an important field of study in process engineering. However, obtaining optimal HEN design is a complex task. When mathematically formulated, it may require sophisticated methods to achieve good solutions. The complexity increases even more for large-scale HEN. In this work, a hybrid meta-heuristic method is presented. A rather simple Simulated Annealing approach is used for the combinatorial level, while a strategy named rocket fireworks optimization is developed and applied to the continuous domain. An advantage over other approaches is that the algorithm was written in C++, which is free and faster when compared to many other languages. The developed method was able to provide the lowest costs solutions reported so far to six cases well studied in the literature. An important feature of the approach here proposed is that, differently from other approaches, it does not split HEN into smaller problems during the optimization. (C) 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J