Compact Hybrid Liquid/Air Heat Exchanger

High conductivity (Hi-K) Carbon-based foams offering extremely high surface area and the highest specific thermal conductivity (conductivity/ density) among engineering materials are considered as ideal candidate materials for advanced heat exchanger and for various thermal management applications. A hybrid heat exchanger using carbon-based foam and standard aluminum heat exchanger materials and components offers many design options, is affordable and is considered production ready. Technical issues have been identified and addressed. Our assessments indicated low development risk toward full commercialization. Depending on the design requirements and constraints, hybrid heat exchanger design can achieve improved performance with significant reduction in weight and/ or volume. Under this program, we propose to design, fabricate and test a hybrid full-size heat exchangers using commercial available carbon foam as the core materials for an advanced compact Air-Liquid heat exchanger application, such as hot fuel/ram air and hot polyalpaolefin (PAO)/ ram air heat exchangers.