Plastic Heat Exchangers with High Conductance

Triton will design a high effectiveness, low size and weight, non-metallic heat exchanger. This technology will reduce the size and cost, and improve the efficiency, of commercial and residential HVAC systems. Triton is proposing a novel microscale geometry and manufacturing method to create a heat exchanger material that can be used in any length or width, allowing infinite design flexibility for form factor. The resulting heat exchanger will be half the size of conventional metal equivalents and offer a 500% increase in heat transfer rate. Triton will design, build, and test the novel heat exchanger. Using data from the baseline prototype, Triton will provide design solutions for large scale use cases. HVAC and industrial heat exchanger applications are the largest markets. Waste heat recovery is another market: the low cost and design flexibility of the Triton product will enable recovery solutions not economical today. Chemical processing is a third application: the non-reactive polymer heat exchanger will facilitate caustic chemical processing, where corrosion causes frequent maintenance and replacement for metallic heat exchangers.