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Advanced copper heat exchangers from low-cost additive manufacturing techniques.

Number: 2158

Author(s) : NASUTA D., HALOTA A., ZHAO A., MZHEN M.

Summary

Heat exchanger designs continue to evolve in response to pressures to reduce thermal and hydraulic resistances, environmental impacts, and costs. Inevitably, these forces yield increasingly miniaturized designs having high surface area to volume ratios and often novel geometries. More compact and exotic heat exchangers have been demonstrated to outperform the current state of the art, but techniques to fabricate these advanced designs remain limited. Current high production volume techniques are too constrained to produce next generation designs; conversely, metal additive manufacturing can produce highly complex geometries, but is often too costly and time-consuming. Taking inspiration from the manufacture of metallic microlattices, a low-cost technique was developed to create functional metallic heat exchangers with conventional materials and consumer-grade products. The fabrication process begins with 3D printing a polymer part on an FDM/FFF or SLA machine. The part is then prepared and electroplated with copper until a sufficiently thick layer of metal has accumulated. Polymer can then be removed from the interior of the part by melting or with a solvent. This process has been used successfully to fabricate sample heat exchangers with flow channel diameters less than 1mm and complex geometries unobtainable through conventional (tube fin or microchannel) manufacturing processes. At present, the technique provides an exciting capability allowing engineers to rapidly fabricate and test novel heat exchanger geometries as prototype or low-volume parts. Future innovations may improve the processes for additive manufacturing, plating, and cleaning parts, further expanding the scale of applications for which the technique can be applied.

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Pages: 10 p.

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  • Original title: Advanced copper heat exchangers from low-cost additive manufacturing techniques.
  • Record ID : 30030499
  • Languages: English
  • Subject: Technology
  • Source: 2022 Purdue Conferences. 19th International Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Conference at Purdue.
  • Publication date: 2022/07/10

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