ABSTRACT Title of thesis: MANUFACTURABILITY ANALYSIS OF THERMALLY-ENHANCED POLYMER COMPOSITE HEAT EXCHANGERS

Thermally-enhanced polymer composite heat exchangers are an attractive al-ternative for applications such as the use of seawater as a cooling medium and other corrosive environments that traditionally use expensive exotic metallic alloys, but a number of manufacturing challenges exist. The goal of this thesis is to develop an understanding of the manufacturing feasibility, in particular mold filling and fiber orientation, of utilizing thermally-enhanced polymer composites and injection molding to manufacture polymer heat exchangers. To best predict mold filling feasibility, this thesis proposes developing an ex-plicit construction of the boundary, represented as a surface based on the parame-ter space, which separates the feasible and infeasible design space. The feasibility boundary for injection molding in terms of the design parameters is quite complex due to the highly nonlinear process physics, which, consequently, makes molding simulation computationally intensive and time consuming. This thesis presents a new approach for the explicit construction of a moldability-based feasibility bound-ary based on intelligent Design of Experiments and adaptive control techniques t