Convective heat transfer enhancement by novel honeycomb-core in sandwich panel exchanger fabricated by additive manufacturing

In the past decades, the convective heat transfer of sandwich panel exchanger with honeycomb-core is enhanced mainly through the cross-section design. In this study, a novel collaborative design of the cross-section and flow direction of honeycomb-core is proposed, where the small channels merge to large channels and the large channels are divided into small channels along the flow direction. The relatively complex sandwich panel exchanger with novel honeycomb-core (SPENH) is fabricated by additive manufacturing. The overall thermal performance and the temperature distribution of heating surface are explored simultaneously via experimental and numerical methods. Compared with the uniform honeycombs, the proposed SPENH has about 14-17% overall heat transfer performance enhancement when the uniform heat flux is applied on the upper or bottom surface, and the highest temperature of heating surface is significantly decreased. In addition, the enhancement mechanism of SPENH is released.