Topology design of two-fluid heat exchange

Abstract

Heat exchangers are devices that typically transfer heat between two fluids. The performance of a heat exchanger such as heat transfer rate and pressure loss strongly depends on the flow regime in the heat transfer system. In this paper, we present a density-based topology optimization method for a two-fluid heat exchange system, which achieves a maximum heat transfer rate under fixed pressure loss. We propose a representation model accounting for three states, i.e., two fluids and a solid wall between the two fluids, by using a single design variable field. The key aspect of the proposed model is that mixing of the two fluids can be essentially prevented. This is because the solid constantly exists between the two fluids due to the use of the single design variable field. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through three-dimensional numerical examples in which an optimized design is compared with a simple reference design, and the effects of design conditions (i.e., Reynolds number, Prandtl number, design domain size, and flow arrangements) are investigated.

Topology optimization of heat exchangers: A review

“…[101]- [105]. For instance, Kobayashi et al The density-based method has shown its high efficiency by avoiding the re-meshing process at each iteration.…”

“…[59]- [62], [64]- [78], [80], [82]- [84], [86], [89], [91], [94]- [100], [103]- [105], [116]- [119], [121], [122], [136]- [138]. As for the single-flow HXs, for instance, Dede et al…”

“…The utilization of gradient-based optimizers is the mainstream in the TO not limited to the problems of HXs [21], [32]- [105], [115]- [124], [136], [137]. According to Fig.…”

Body-fitted topology optimization of 2D and 3D fluid-to-fluid heat exchangers

“…The topology optimization of such systems proves quite challenging, in part due to the modelling and the implementation of a non-mixing constraint between different input channels. It has been an active research issue since the seminal MSc thesis [76], see notably the recent works [80,48,81,79,87,58] and the introduction in [54] for an overview.…”

“…Several approaches have been proposed in the aforementioned works to circumvent this drawback, e.g. : the use of a fluid-tracking model in [76,87], that of a suitable interpolation scheme in [58], or of a filter enforcing a solid coating around each fluid phase [48,54]. One of the common difficulties of this class of methods is the selection of appropriate metaparameters which penalize sufficiently the porous interfaces between the two fluids but which also ensure that the inlets are indeed connected to the outlets [54].…”