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Heat Exchangers and Advanced Cooling Concepts

Cooling technology plays an important role in many engineering applications, for example, cooling of hot components in gas turbines, electronic equipment, and spacecraft. More recently, the thermal management of electrical batteries, fuel cells, and concentrated solar receivers is becoming one of the limiting factors in the development of electrical vehicles and utilization of renewable energy source. Therefore, there is a continuous need for innovative, reliable and cost-effective thermal management solution which calls for a new generation of heat exchangers that can deliver superior thermal performance while keeping the cost, size, and weight to minimum.

One way to boost the heat transfer effectiveness of heat exchangers is to increase the ratio of surface area to volume by using micro- and minichannels. However, mini- and microchannel heat exchangers have not realized their full potential due to the inherent limitations such as the high pressure drop, flow maldistribution, and high manufacturing cost. To address these challenges, there is a need to develop compact heat exchangers using inexpensive additive manufacturing (AM) technique which can fabricate the complex geometries and internal structures that are not easily produced using conventional subtractive manufacturing process.

Meanwhile, to further reduce the weight and cost of heat exchangers, it is crucial to develop the advanced polymer-based heat exchangers with aid of the AM technology. Currently, we are collaborating with a variety of industrial partners to work on the AM-enabled heat exchangers. In addition to the global heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop, and a number of fundamental questions are also addressed.

Contact

For more information or an interest in collaboration:

Christer Fureby

christer.fureby@energy.lth.se

Martin Andersson 

martin.andersson@energy.lth.se

Lei Wang

lei.wang@energy.lth.se

Page Manager: isabelle.frej@energy.lth.se | 2021-04-15