Design of thermoelectric heat exchangers for additive manufacturing

Abstract

This document presents the thesis of the Design of Heat Exchangers with Additive Manufacturing for Thermoelectric Module Systems for the Master of Science with major in Manufacturing Systems at Tecnológico de Monterrey. This study investigates the overall performance and manufacturing process for a heat exchanger equipped with a thermoelectric module (TEM) for cooling systems. A TEM system is a solid-state power converter consisting of an array of thermocouples connected electrically in series and thermally in parallel. Normally, it is used as an arrangement of many TE modules connected electrically in series and thermally in parallel to maximize the results. However, when it is desired to cool other components, a heat exchanger is attached to transmit the energy. Recently, TEM systems have been proposed to substitute conventional heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems due to their compact designs, lower maintenance and multiples uses modes. However, TEM systems usually have lower efficiency than conventional HVAC systems. This document explores using additive manufacturing to produce novel heat exchangers with a potential application in TEM devices. In this research was manufactured via Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) three heat exchangers from which two are made with a novel design based on gyroid lattice structure in order to compare with traditional heat exchangers. The results indicated a 25% improvement in cooling capacity for a heat exchanger with a gyroid structure with at least 1mm of wall thickness. The methodology followed for this research is presented with a theoretical background, analysis, experimentation and simulation of the heat exchanger in order to evaluate its performance with TEM systems for cooling. The expected contribution of this research is to generate new knowledge about the application of heat exchangers with complex structures (achieved by additive manufacturing) in the application of climatization with thermoelectric systems, since a point of view of production until an improvement on thermal efficiency, also propose an experimental setup that can be replicated by other researchers to test the cooling capacity of novel heat exchangers.