Tube Shape Optimization for Air-to-Refrigerant Heat Exchangers

It is well known that in heat exchangers for HVAC&R applications, the air-side is the dominant resistance. Significant effort has been devoted to improving the heat transfer performance of air-side surfaces. Conventional heat exchangers use round tubes or flat tubes but other shapes are seldom explored. In this seminar, an approach for shape optimization is presented that allows for full topology optimization of the heat exchanger tube for a given application. A prototype is fabricated using 3D Metal Printing technique and its performance is measured in the laboratory. The comparison of predicted vs. measured performance is presented and conclusions drawn.