Experimental characterization of heat transfer in an additively manufactured polymer heat exchanger

Abstract

In addition to their low cost and weight, polymer heat exchangers offer good anticorrosion and antifouling properties. In this work, a cost effective air-water polymer heat exchanger made of thin polymer sheets using layer-by-layer line welding with a laser through an additive manufacturing process was fabricated and experimentally tested. The flow channels were made of 150 μm-thick high density polyethylene sheets, which were 15.5 cm wide and 29 cm long. The experimental results show that the overall heat transfer coefficient of 35-120 W/m 2 K is achievable for an air-water fluid combination for air-side flow rate of 3-24 L/s and water-side flow rate of 12.5 mL/s. In addition, by fabricating a very thin wall heat exchanger (150 μm), the wall thermal resistance, which usually becomes the limiting factor on polymer heat exchangers, was calculated to account for only 3% of the total thermal resistance. A comparison of the air-side heat transfer coefficient of the present polymer heat exchanger with some of the commercially available plain plate fin heat exchanger surfaces suggests that its performance in general is superior to that of common plain plate fin surfaces.

Open Source Laser Polymer Welding System: Design and Characterization of Linear Low-Density Polyethylene Multilayer Welds

“…For example, the system can be used for additive manufacturing of vehicle heat recovery ventilators for the automotive industry [36], industrial heat exchangers [6,37], heat exchangers for solar water pasteurization [38], hermetic thermoplastic medical device encapsulation [39], bio-microfluidic channels in transparent polymer materials [40], and consumer goods packaging [41]. The polymer laser welder described is ideal for rapid prototyping.…”

“…A contact free manufacturing method, such as laser welding, provides increased flexibility and further application than its conventional joint bonding processes [1]. Advancement in the field of polymer welding has expanded applications to microfluid polymer packages [2], aseptic packaging [3], hermetic sealing of an electronic car key [4], microfluidic channels [5], and additively manufactured and complex microchannel heat exchangers [6,7].…”

A New Test Setup for Testing Polyethylene Tubes Under Constant and Cyclic Internal Pressures

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Recent Developments in High Temperature Heat Exchangers: A Review

“…These designs typically use microchannels as well as fin geometries to accomplish the higher area. An added advantage of smaller channel sizes is that the heat transfer in such miniature geometries is much higher (Arie et al, 2017;Kandlikar et al, 2005). Advances in manufacturing processes, such as 3D printing, have helped engineers to fabricate designs which are difficult to fabricate otherwise Gerstler and Erno, 2017).…”