Additively manufactured compact water-cooled refrigerant condenser

Abstract

Two-phase heat exchangers are widely used in the power and process industries, heating ventilation and air conditioning, refrigeration, and electronics thermal management. This work presents the design, manufacturing, and performance evaluation of an additively manufactured (AM) water-cooled R134a condenser heat exchanger. The condenser design includes internal three-dimensional (3D) structures enabled by AM that are not possible from traditional manufacturing technologies. Our novel design methodology uses a physics-based model to rapidly search the large design space, followed by detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations that verify performance. The design employs alternating channels for water and refrigerant flow, with optimized 3D shapes that enhance the heat transfer with wavy fins on the water side and chevrons on the refrigerant side. Experiments demonstrate that the AM condenser has a heat transfer rate of 3 kW to 8 kW for refrigerant saturation temperatures of 35 to 49 °C. The AM condenser has a power density as high as 6.2 MW/m³, outperforming traditional shell-tube designs by 30–50% with comparable normalized pumping power. The developed methods provide a robust framework for the design of high performance and high volumetric power density AM heat exchangers.