Session: 13-01 - Heat Exchangers

Paper Number: 128603

128603 - Multi-Disciplinary Optimization of Gyroid Topologies for a Cold Plate Heat Exchanger Design 

The strive for electrification in today’s civil aviation industry has brought the need for increasingly powerful on-board electrical systems, including those meant to replace heavier, bulkier hydraulic flight control devices. These high-performance electrical components are bound to produce large amounts of heat that, if not dissipated properly, will lead to malfunctioning and even permanent damage. For this reason, high performance heat exchangers represent a key enabler for future advances in aircraft systems electrification and are vital to meet net zero goals and reduce our aviation’s carbon footprint. For a given volume of the exchanger, the heat flow rate can be increased by adopting more sophisticated fluid domains. However, excessive geometrical complexity will lead to an increase in pressure losses, often resulting in inhomogeneous temperature distributions. In this paper, a novel optimization procedure is employed to maximize the efficiency of a high-performance heat exchanger, while minimizing overall pressure loss and temperature gradients. The optimization is performed with full-3D high-fidelity computational flow simulations using the commercial code Ansys Fluent. The geometry of the fluid domain is constituted by triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS), with a parametrization based on thickness and aspect ratios, done by using the nTopology suite. To assess the performance gain, the optimized TPMS design is compared against the baseline one and a conventional serpentine design.

Presenting Author: Elhusseiny Daifalla Rolls-Royce

Presenting Author Biography: I am a 5th-year Mechanical Engineering with Aeronautics MEng student at The University of Glasgow. This work is for my master's thesis 'Multi-disciplinary Optimization of Gyroid Structures for a Cold Plate Heat Exchanger Design' done in industry at Rolls-Royce. My research interests include multi-objective optimization, topology optimization, and CFD.

Authors:

Elhusseiny Daifalla Rolls-Royce
Shahrokh Shahpar Rolls-Royce
Indi Tristanto Rolls-Royce
Mario Carta Rolls-Royce