Thermal Performance Study of Additively Manufactured Compact Heat Exchangers for Industrial Energy Systems

Abstract

Compact heat exchangers are central to industrial energy efficiency because they enable waste-heat recovery, thermal integration, and reduced equipment volume. Additive manufacturing (AM) is especially attractive for this application because it can produce thin walls, integrated manifolds, lattice cores, and triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) channels that are difficult to realize with conventional fabrication routes. In this paper, a numerical thermal study is presented for three compact AM heat-exchanger concepts intended for industrial energy systems: a straight microchannel core, a wavy-channel core, and a gyroid TPMS core. All geometries were compared within the same overall envelope and material system in order to isolate the influence of internal architecture on heat duty, effectiveness, and pressure drop. A design-oriented ε-NTU framework coupled with Reynolds-number-dependent thermal and hydraulic correlations was used to evaluate performance for hot-side air inlet temperatures of 523 K and a water-side inlet temperature of 303 K. At the design point (hot-side mass flow rate of 0.035 kg/s), the straight-channel, wavy-channel, and gyroid designs delivered 3.90, 4.96, and 5.83 kW of heat duty, respectively. Corresponding effectiveness values were 0.50, 0.64, and 0.75, while pressure drops were 11, 18, and 29 kPa. The gyroid design therefore provided the strongest heat-transfer performance, but the wavy-channel core offered the best thermal-hydraulic compromise for practical retrofits. The results confirm that AM architectures can significantly improve compact heat-exchanger performance for industrial waste-heat recovery, although manufacturing cost, roughness control, and long-term reliability remain important barriers to commercial deployment.