Project

The advent of Additive Manufacturing (AM) has opened up the pathway for the design of compact heat exchangers with novel shapes, complex geometries and smaller size. AM technologies enable the direct translation of CAD/CFD models into physical prototypes, thus modelling and simulation will play a critical role for the design and optimization of components and materials. In particular, the multi-scale simulation of fluid flow and heat transfer to truly optimise the design of heat exchangers for specific applications represents one of the major challenges at the design stage. Topology optimization will be helpful for the development of novel design methodologies for heat exchangers, which will certainly improve the attractiveness of AM technologies to industry and help their employment for mass production. The detailed morphological characterization of heat transfer surfaces will also help address some of the issues related to additive manufactured heat exchangers, such as the dimensional accuracy and surface quality, which are largely unpredictable at the moment as they depend on the selected material and the AM process itself. Other limitations that create boundaries for the application of AM regard process parameter optimization, surface-roughness control, post-processing requirements and compatible raw materials.
The present project aims at both providing methodologies for the design and the optimization of additive manufactured heat exchangers and broadening the knowledge of the occurring physical mechanisms by means of experimental tests during single-phase and two-phase flow.