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Advanced air-side heat transfer surface geometries enabled by additive manufacturing.

Number: pap. 2306

Author(s) : LEEDS C., WRIGHT C., NELLIS G.

Summary

To maintain the performance of power plants while switching from water-cooling to air- (or dry-) cooling it is necessary to develop low-cost high-performance heat exchangers. Additive manufacturing using highly-filled polymers that provide increased conductivity and design freedom for manufacturing provide one path towards this goal. Advanced air-side heat transfer surface geometries enabled by additive manufacturing are being explored. One option is the axially-tapered (i.e., hourglass-shaped) pin fin array geometries considered in this work using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The axially-tapered pin fin uses less material than a conventional, provides higher heat transfer coefficient for most configurations (due to the small, on average, diameter) (Žukauskas, 1972), and provides a larger open area for air flow and thus a lower pressure drop. The fins can be manufactured such that they are hollow, allowing water flow into them and thus reducing the conduction resistance further. This paper uses ANSYS Workbench (ANSYS, 2016) to generate a range of pin fin geometries and meshes that are deployed as a large array of parallel CFD simulations in the Center for High Throughput Computing. The Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software (Klein, 2015) is used to develop correlations, which can then be implemented into heat exchanger optimization models. The predicted performance is compared to experimental data. The as-printed vs as-designed heat transfer surfaces are compared.

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Pages: 10

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Details

  • Original title: Advanced air-side heat transfer surface geometries enabled by additive manufacturing.
  • Record ID : 30024488
  • Languages: English
  • Source: 2018 Purdue Conferences. 17th International Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Conference at Purdue.
  • Publication date: 2018/07/09

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