Session: 30-05 Heat Exchangers

Paper Number: 151496

Computational Modeling of a 3D Printed Recuperator and Subsequent Experimental Loop for Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Cycles 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in collaboration with mechanical-thermal energy storage (mTES) provider EarthEn, a US Department of Energy (DOE) Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP) recipient at ORNL’s Innovation Crossroads 2023, is utilizing a state-of-the-art patented 3D printing technique to design an additively manufactured (AM) supercritical CO₂ (sCO₂) recuperator for EarthEn’s charge/discharge cycle. The AM recuperator will be printed at ORNL’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility using Inconel Alloy 718 and tested on a closed-loop, ~100 kW experimental facility, that is being constructed to test and compare the printed design with a modern commercial-off-the-shelf Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger (PCHE) recuperator. The design of the facility is guided by a Modelica-based system model which is primarily dependent on the open-source TRANSFORM library developed at ORNL and uses the open-source CoolProp library for thermophysical properties of sCO₂ via the External Media library. It is envisioned that an iterative process will be followed between the physical loop and the system model wherein the initial experimental data will be used to tune the model which will in-turn be used to guide future loop operation. Simultaneously, the AM recuperator is being designed using computer aided design models and analyzed for hydraulic and thermo-mechanical response using commercial computational fluid dynamics software, Siemens STAR-CCM+, on DOE high-performance computing resources.

Presenting Author: Nathan See Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Presenting Author Biography: Mr. Nathan See is a Research Staff Member in the Energy System Development group in the Fusion and Fission Energy and Science Directorate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Prior to joining ORNL, Nathan spent 13 years in the aerospace industry focusing on coupling CFD and physical testing, including wind tunnel and on-track testing; and everything from supersonic business jets to ballistics, and ground vehicles to race cars. Nathan is highly experienced in large scale HPC computing, utilizing some of the fastest machines over the last decade (Jaguar, JaguarPF, Kraken, EOS, Titan, and Summit). At ORNL, Nathan's focus is on utilizing his experiences in computational and physical testing to further reduce the environmental impact of the Nation through the use of additive manufacturing in power-block research and nuclear research.

Authors:

Nathan See Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Kevin Robb Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Nolan Goth Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Vivek Rao Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Vineet Kumar Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Diego Morales Purdue University