The shape of plate-fin type heat sink is numerically optimized to acquire the minimum pressure drop under the required temperature rise. In constrained nonlinear optimization problems of thermal/fluid systems, three fundamental difficulties such as high computational cost for function evaluations (i.e., pressure drop and thermal resistance), the absence of design sensitivity information, and the occurrence of numerical noise are commonly confronted. Thus, a sequential approximate optimization (SAO) algorithm has been introduced because it is very hard to obtain the optimal solutions of fluid/thermal systems by means of gradient-based optimization techniques. In this study, the progressive quadratic response surface method (PQRSM) based on the trust region algorithm, which is one of sequential approximate optimization algorithms, is used for optimization and the heat sink is optimized by combining it with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD).