Correlations for thermal-hydraulic characteristics play a decisive role during the initial design of parameters in heat exchangers. In this paper, an approach for rapidly deriving correlations of heat transfer and pressure drop is proposed by introducing response surface methodology. This approach consists of generating experimental design matrix and intermediate operation matrix, establishing fitted regression equations, and deriving thermal-hydraulic correlations for heat transfer equipment, which is applicable to obtain correlations with multiple independent variables with interactive impacts. The number of experiments and the influence of artificial factor can be reduced remarkably by this approach. Meanwhile, the feasibility of this approach is successfully exemplified by three deriving cases. This research provides a method for rapidly correlating thermal -hydraulic characteristics in heat exchangers under the conditions of limited time and less spending of research and development. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.