Heat Transfer Investigation of an Additively Manufactured Minichannel Heat Exchanger

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates the thermal performance of laminar single-phase flow in an additively manufactured minichannel heat exchanger both experimentally and numerically. Distilled water was employed as the working fluid, and the minichannel heat exchanger was made from aluminum alloy (AlSi10Mg) through direct metal laser sintering (DMLS). The minichannel was designed with a hydraulic diameter of 2.86 mm. The Reynolds number ranged from 175 to 1360, and the heat exchanger was tested under two different heat fluxes of 1.5 kWm−2 and 3 kWm−2. A detailed experiment was conducted to obtain the thermal properties of AlSi10Mg. Furthermore, the heat transfer characteristics of the minichannel heat exchanger was analyzed numerically by solving a three-dimensional conjugate heat transfer using the COMSOL Multiphysics® to verify the experimental results. The experimental results were also compared to widely accepted correlations in literature. It is found that 95% and 79% of the experimental data are within ±10% range of both the simulation results and the values from the existing correlations, respectively. Hence, the good agreement found between the experimental and simulation results highlights the possibility of the DMLS technique as a promising method for manufacturing future multiport minichannel heat exchangers.