Thermal performance of novel heat exchangers fabricated by selective laser melting

This report presents and analyses the thermal performance of various heat exchanger designs fabricated using the Selective Laser Melting (SLM) technique. Their thermal performances were then evaluated against commercially available heat exchangers to assess the usefulness and efficiency of the SLM fabricated heat exchangers. Overall, the SLM fabricated heat exchangers exhibit superior heat transfer performance as compared to the commercially available heat exchangers. In particular, the SLM fabricated porous heat exchangers demonstrated significantly better heat transfer performance as compared to other heat exchangers. For a given mass flow rate, the air-side heat transfer coefficients of the porous heat exchanger were more than 2 times higher as compared to those of a commercially available heat exchanger. However, the pressure drops recorded for the porous heat exchangers were also significantly high. On the other hand, the SLM fabricated heat exchanger with airfoil tubes was shown to be a good balance between enhancing heat transfer performance while not increasing the pressure drop significantly. Based on the findings obtained from this investigation, further recommendations were proposed. These include conducting more experiments on porous heat exchangers of different porous unit cell size and the use of the Modified Wilson Plot method to obtain the water-side heat transfer coefficient to help increase the accuracy of the experimental results.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering