A perspective on the current and future roles of additive manufacturing in process engineering, with an emphasis on heat transfer

Abstract

This review provides an overview of the current state of additive manufacturing in the context of process engineering. The results and opinions from a wide range of public domain reports has been compiled, and used to formulate a new perspective in the ways additive manufacturing has been exploited for heat transfer, and what some of the future opportunities will be moving forward. In addition, this review identifies several specific challenge areas for heat transfer, as well as various broad challenge areas affecting additive manufacturing applications in general. Finally, this review discusses three case studies from the process intensification group at Newcastle University, to put into context how additive manufacturing addresses problems in the pursuit of meeting new intensification objectives. These include: (1) the miniaturisation of the TORBED® technology for screening adsorbents for carbon capture, (2) proposing novel heat pipe wick geometries that could potentially fully optimise the thermal performance of heat pipes, and (3) producing complex reactor geometries to improve the scalability of flow chemistry.