High performance, microarchitected, compact heat exchanger enabled by 3D printing

Additive manufacturing has created a paradigm shift in materials design and innovation, providing avenues and opportunities for geometric design freedom and customizations. Here, we report a microarchitected gyroid lattice liquid-liquid compact heat exchanger realized via stereolithography additive manufacturing as a single ready-to-use unit. This lightweight (~240 kg/m(3)) compact heat exchanger (with conjoined headers), with an engineered porosity of 80% and a separating wall thickness of 300 mu m, has a surface to volume ratio of 670 m(2)/ m(3). X-ray computed tomography imaging confirms a defect-free 3D printed heat exchanger. The thermohydraulic characteristics were experimentally measured using water as the working fluid. The measurements indicate that the heat exchanger evinces an overall heat transfer coefficient of 120-160W/m(2)K for hot fluid Reynolds number Reh in the range of 10(-40). Additionally, finite element analysis was conducted to evaluate the thermo-hydraulic characteristics of the gyroid lattice heat exchanger. The experimental results show-a 55% increase in exchanger effectiveness for the additively manufactured gyroid lattice heat exchanger in comparison to a thermodynamically equivalent, most-efficient, counter-flow heat exchanger at one tenth of its size. The superiority of our architected heat exchanger to extant work is also demonstrated.

Automated summary

Additive manufacturing has revolutionized materials design and innovation by providing opportunities for geometric design freedom and customization. In this study, a microarchitected gyroid lattice liquid-liquid compact heat exchanger was successfully fabricated using stereolithography additive manufacturing. The heat exchanger exhibited superior heat transfer performance and smaller size compared to a thermodynamically equivalent counter-flow heat exchanger.