Exploratory study of additively manufactured heat exchangers for aerospace applications

Thermal management is a crucial part in the aviation industry. It is also essential that the components involved in aviation be light weight. One of the vital components of thermal management is heat exchangers. It has been observed that the optimization of the heat exchanger is approaching its saturation with traditional manufacturing. To overcome this challenge engineers are exploring the new revolutionary technology of additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing has created the opportunity of design freedom for the optimization of heat exchangers with complex heat exchanger microchannels and optimized fin designs.This project essentially focuses on generating complex heat exchanger cores with organic lattice structures such as Triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) geometry. Evaluation of the heat exchanger core has been done using computational fluid dynamic analysis and a comparative study is done to choose the most suitable geometry for the fluid-fluid heat exchangers. A static thermal evaluation of the strut-based lattice structure has been conducted for fin designs and support structure to be used in laser powder bed fusion technology. Additionally, the selected geometry from the analysis has been incorporated into a demonstrator product. The key limitation of this process has been addressed in this project