🏆 Best Poster 2nd Place
The objective of this project is to design an additive manufactured heat exchanger used for a mobile battery management system and improve the size, weight, and required power compared to a baseline conventional radiator.
Sponsor
Mainstream Engineering Corporation
Team Members
Patrick Bradley Taher Soliman Joseph Bolner
Project Poster
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Project Video
Project Summary
Overview
Our sponsor, Mainstream Engineering, tasked us with designing an additive manufactured heat exchanger for a mobile battery thermal management system. We had to reduce the size, weight, and power (SWaP) of our heat exchanger from a conventional CPU radiator. The sponsor also wanted comparable heat rejection rates from our design if we were to metal print our model.
Objectives
Our team wanted to create a unique heat exchanger prototype with sufficient data from CFD and experimental testing to prove it out performs the baseline radiator in terms of SWaP and cooling.
Approach
– Gather customer needs from the problem statement and sponsor
– Research modern efforts in additive manufactured heat exchanger design and learn about triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS)
– Leverage the findings from research to come up with an initial prototype that has an internal gyroid geometry
– Model the prototype in SolidWorks and then nTopology, which allows for the implementation of the gyroid and other complex geometries into the model
– Use Ansys Fluent to calculate the temperature drop, pressure drop, and heat rejection of our first prototype
– Print the model with an SLA resin printer to ensure it is water tight
– Create a test loop to gather the same outputs from CFD and verify the results
– Continue to alter the design in terms of wall thickness and TPMS geometry
– Use CFD to test for improvements in each prototype
– Resin print the final prototype and use the test loop to compare its performance to the performance of the baseline CPU radiator
Outcomes
– The project resulted in the creation of an additive manufactured heat exchanger with an internal gyroid geometry that is able to be mass produced with a SLA printer or a metal printer.
– In terms of SWaP and cooling, our final model was 25.33% smaller than the baseline radiator and showed a 2.36% increase in heat rejection. Our heat exchanger will free up space in the vehicle using the mobile battery thermal management system, while also ensuring that the battery remains within its operating temperature range.