Highly efficient heat transfer components produced by LBM: Presentation held at DDMC 2018, Fraunhofer Direct Digital Manufacturing Conference, March 14, 2018, Berlin

The market for additively manufactured metal parts is rapidly growing. Powder based fusion technologies such as Laser Beam Melting (LBM) and Electron Beam Melting (EBM) are leading this market, whereby LBM is dominating in machine sales and diversity in industrial applications. Nevertheless, the geometric freedom that is given by these processes is still not fully used in terms of design methods. Especially process restrictions have to be considered in economically designing a component for additive manufacturing. In this article, geometries of heat exchangers and such approaches are presented that address the process restrictions and using the geometrical freedom of the process. It is shown, that using optimal inner structures can increase heat flow by factor of five compared to a very simple design which also can be produced by drilling. Despite a very complex design is used for this increase in heat flow, the pressure drop is negligible larger. Intermediate designs showed a significantly lower performance by lower heat flow and higher pressure drop. For the presented work, Creo Parametric was used to design the inner structures combining the whole part with an approach for automated structure generation. Fluid simulations were carried out with Ansys CFX to compare the heat transfer capability and pressure drop of these structures. At last, an outlook on future developments for designing parts like heat exchangers for additively manufactured metal parts will be given