Novel Heat Exchangers with Enhanced Surface

75454 Current heat exchangers use a conventional fin-tube design, which requires a large volume, leading to low efficiencies in thermal management systems. This project will develop an innovative technology to enable the low-cost fabrication of compact microchannel heat exchanger modules with enhanced surface and thermal efficiency. Phase I demonstrated the critical processing steps for fabricating the microchannel heat exchangers with metal foams. In Phase II, the fabrication process will be further developed and optimized, and a modular design for the heat exchangers will be established. The potential for miniaturizing chemical engineering unit operations will be demonstrated. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: The low-cost compact heat exchangers should result in dramatic reductions in the size and weight of fuel reformer used for hydrogen production. Other applications include heat recovery from microturbines and fuel cells, cooling electronic devices and vehicles, cabin heating, air conditioning, man-portable heaters for cold and hot climates, etc.