Development of Novel Heat Exchangers with High Thermal Conductivity and Deformable Walls

Abstract

Heat exchangers prove its utmost importance in various fields ranging from heat recovery units to power plants and process industries. Considering the enormity of the total energy involved and used in all heat exchanger operations, enhancements in heat exchanger performance are increasingly needed to push the limits of the global energy efficiency to higher levels.

Four common problems that all heat exchangers suffer from one way or another - pressure drop, fouling, clogging, and corrosion - limit the reliability and performance of heat exchangers. This research involves the development of a micro heat exchanger with a new class of Thermal Interface Materials (TIMs). TIMs can address the problems of the conventional heat exchanger by acting as a thermally conductive deformable wall because these hybrid nanocomposites have a very high bulk thermal conductivity with relatively low elastic modulus.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the performances of the heat exchanger with deformable walls while putting particular emphasis on the change of pressure drop and the enhancement of 3heat transfer characteristics. This analysis was investigated via simulation tools, COMSOL 5.3 Multiphysics and ANSYS 18.0.

This study can contribute to the investigation of TIMs’ potential as a promising material for microchannel heat exchanger and the comprehensive understanding of the interaction between fluid flow, deformable structure, and the heat transfer.