Project Details

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Additive manufacturing technology development for large-scale heat exchangers

Company: Echogen Power Systems (DE), Inc.

Major(s):
Primary: ME
Secondary: IE
Optional: MATSE

Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO

Intellectual Property: NO

Many power conversion and energy storage systems use a large number of heat exchangers, which are critical for their performance and make up a significant amount of the system cost and size. The most advanced energy systems in development are more dependent than ever on these key components. However, the manufacturing technology used for these systems was developed in the 1970's and 1980's, with little advancement since then. Additive manufacturing offers a new way to design and build heat exchangers, but its use to date has focused on relatively small scale designs. The unique challenges posed by the scale of power conversion and energy storage systems have thus far been unable to be met by additive manufacturing processes. However, in the last few years, advances in AM technology have potentially enabled large-scale heat exchangers to be manufactured in a hybrid approach that takes advantage of both traditional and AM techniques. In this project, the team will conduct a survey of the latest in AM technology with the assistance of Echogen and the PSU/3D Systems CIMP-3D collaboration, use a combination of classical heat transfer and fluid mechanical correlations to create a conceptual design of a heat exchanger core that can uniquely be manufactured through AM methods, and build a coupon-scale heat exchanger core that can provide validation of the conceptual design by subscale testing.