Research · 05
Additively Manufactured Heat Exchanger Design
적층 기반 열교환기 설계
We design heat exchangers that are smaller yet move more heat, using flow-passage geometries only additive manufacturing can produce.
Card figures are concept diagrams.
Measured — turn it yourself
Figure · Jin Su Kim
Drag to rotate.
A three-dimensional velocity field inside a gyroid lattice, measured by magnetic resonance velocimetry (MRV). This is not a concept diagram but a real measurement (Re = 2360).
The 401 streamlines are integrated from the measured field after smoothing it over about one voxel.
How well a heat exchanger performs is decided by the shape of the path the fluid takes. Stacking thin plates or bundling tubes kept those shapes within the limits of machining. Additive manufacturing lets us print curved passages, as a single piece, that could never be cut.
We study structures with large heat-transfer area per unit volume, such as triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS), and use computational fluid dynamics to find the balance between pressure loss and heat transfer. We check in parallel whether the geometry can actually be printed and inspected once built. The target is a heat exchanger that fits the tight envelope of a small modular reactor.
What we work on
- 01Pressure-loss versus heat-transfer trade-off across TPMS passage geometries
- 02Mapping which passage geometries an additive process can actually realize
- 03Compact designs sized for an integral SMR layout