NUMERICAL MODELING AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF A NOVEL METAL-POLYMER COMPOSITE HEAT EXCHANGER FOR SENSIBLE AND LATENT THERMAL ENERGY STORAGE APPLICATIONS

Compact, lightweight, and low-cost heat exchangers (HXs) have the potential to improve efficiencies and save power and carbon foot print in a wide array of applications. The present study investigates an entirely additively-manufactured novel metal-polymer composite heat exchanger, enabled by an innovative and patented cross-media thermal exchange approach, which yields an effective thermal conductivity of 130 W/m-K for the heat exchanger. This record-high thermal conductivity is more than an order of magnitude higher that the previously reported thermal conductivity for polymer and polymer composite HXs. Drawing on the concept of external flow over the tube banks, the proposed HX features a staggered arrangement of fins. This class of HXs are often used for gas-to-liquid sensible cooling applications. However, they can also be designed for latent thermal energy storage applications by employing low-cost and high energy-storage-density phase change materials (PCMs) such as salt-hydrates and alike in either the hot or cold side of the HX, depending on the application. An extensive literature survey on tube banks shows that, though numerous correlations exist in the literature for flow over tube banks, these correlations usually fall outside the range for the current HX design for low-Reynolds number applications (Re