Performance, Manufacturability and Mechanical Properties of Near-Net Shaped Pyramidal Fin Arrays for Compact Heat Exchangers Produced Using Cold Spray as an Additive Manufacturing Technique

• Main Author: Cormier, Yannick
• Other Authors: Jodoin, Bertrand
• Language: en
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2016
• Subjects: Cold Gas Dynamic Spray; Additive Manufacturing; Pyramidal Fin Arrays; Near-Net Shaped; Compact Heat Exchangers; Aluminum; Stainless Steel; Nickel
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/34981; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-4946

Significant efforts have been made in the last decades to decrease the world’s dependency to fossil fuels. One of the fronts which has shown major improvement is gas turbine efficiency. To this end, components such as recuperators have been developed to recover heat that is usually trapped and wasted in the exhaust gases of combustion processes. Brayton Energy Canada has recently developed a promising compact heat exchanger that could be used as a recuperator in gas turbines. Nevertheless, this novel type of wire mesh heat exchanger still has room for improvement, especially regarding the way that its fin arrays are manufactured due to the fact that the technique presently used is time consuming and consequently costly. The present research aims to manufacture near-net shaped pin fin arrays using cold gas dynamic spray as an additive manufacturing technique by selectively covering the substrate by the means of a mask. Moreover, this research work studies the feasibility of using CGDS as an additive manufacturing technique to produce pin fin arrays, the thermal and hydrodynamic performances of this new type of pin fin created, the effect of geometric parameters such as fin density and height on the performances, the viability of the sprayed pin fins in a real environment by means of finding mechanical properties such as adhesion strength, the possibility of producing a streamwise material anisotropic fin arrays, and finally the different adhesion mechanisms by means of numerical modeling of the relevant impact physics.