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Manufacturing Technology Insights | Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Designing heat exchangers is made easier by additive manufacturing and software technologies, which increase performance in many thermal management applications.
Fremont, CA: Engineers must work harder with fewer resources as product design complexity rises across almost all industries, particularly in thermal management. With several design limitations, maintaining product temperature properly is a challenging issue.
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Engineers have tried to overcome these limitations for years but are constrained by manufacturing technology. Manufacturers may create innovative heat exchanger (HEX) designs with the aid of improvements in manufacturing techniques like 3D printing and software tools like computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
Engineers can continue to expound on the advantages of additive manufacturing (AM), but they need to see measurable outcomes before businesses engage in the technology. Gaining support can be facilitated by seeing first-hand how software tools and additive manufacturing can solve conventional heat management issues. Here are a few examples of applications where software development and additive manufacturing have enhanced heat control.
• Fuel-Cooled Oil Coolers
In many industrial processing or power production rigs, heat exchangers are used to cooling the engine and gearbox oil. The combustion efficiency increases by preheating cold fuel in the same heat exchangers.
Engineers are constrained by size and weight issues because the commercially available shell and tube oil coolers are too big or heavy for mobile or miniature systems. Engineers might create novel heat exchanger models that maintain the heat transfer area while minimizing size and mass to satisfy these limits.
• Electronics Cooling
The need for thermal management is greater than ever in the drive toward electrification. To guarantee product dependability, engineers must properly cool electrical components. Cold plates are a practical method for controlling the temperature of electrical components. The size of the heat exchanger, which restricts thermal performance, is a chronic problem, and engineers can utilize additive manufacturing to get around this restriction.
• Semiconductor Wafer Table
Semiconductor production was one of the supply chains that suffered the most damage from the epidemic. Therefore, semiconductor manufacturers are under greater pressure than ever to increase their production capacity. Therefore, semiconductor design experts need to create ever-more innovative designs.
• Flow Guides
Using heat exchangers to ensure appropriate fluid flow via pipes and manifolds is challenging. Engineers use flow guides to reduce pressure drops and remove dead zones in pipes and manifolds. However, modeling and additive manufacturing are more effective ways to decide on the ideal fin design for heat exchangers.
Engineers may optimize heat exchanger designs using data from computational fluid dynamics. This information guarantees that the HEX shape will alter the fluid flow to provide the least-resistance flow channel, hence reducing energy loss. Engineers can easily adjust fin thickness, spacing, and size to obtain the ideal design for their purposes.
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