Design, Modeling and Characterization on Triply Periodic Minimal Surface Heat Exchangers with Additive Manufacturing

Next-generation power plants will generate heated fluids at significantly higher temperatures than current-generation power plants, which challenges the state-of-the-art heat exchanger design. In this study triply periodic minimal surfaces were combined with additive manufacturing for next-generation heat exchanger design. Triply periodic minimal surfaces separate three-dimensional space into two interpenetrating channels, creating high surface area to volume ratios and low hydrodynamic resistance. Parametric design of triply periodic minimal surface heat exchanger is straightforward because they are governed by simple implicit functions with parameters such as periodic length and offset parameter. In this study a design workflow was developed to streamline the design of triply periodic minimal surface heat exchangers and a numerical model was developed to optimize triply periodic minimal surface heat exchanger design for optimal performance. Finally, the optimized triply periodic minimal surface heat exchanger was printed with EOS M290 DMLS machine and the performance was tested by experiment.