CEEE Wins Best Session Paper Award for Experimental Methods at The 15th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics (HEFAT)

The Center for Environmental Energy Engineering won the award for Best Session Paper in Experimental Methods for the paper “Design Optimization and Experimental Validation of Heat Exchangers Utilizing High Performance, Non-round Tubes” at The 15^th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics (HEFAT) and Editorial Board for Applied Thermal Engineering (ATE).

The paper was a collaboration between both the EEHP and MOC consortium groups and authored by researchers James Tancabel, Dr. Vikrant Aute, Ellery Klein, Dr. Yunho Hwang, Dr. Jiazhen Ling, Jan Muehlbauer and Dr. Reinhard Radermacher.

The paper focused on designing, optimizing, and experimentally validating a high-performance air-to-refrigerant heat exchangers (HX) that are commonly used in air-conditioning and heat pump systems. These systems account for a significant fraction of primary energy consumption in most developed nations, so improving the heat exchange components is of great interest.

The novel heat exchanger designs utilize shape-optimized, non-round tubes, and are at least 20% better than the current state-of-the-art designs. These optimal designs are obtained through a highly automated design process that results in over 90% reduction in engineering time compared to conventional design methods.

The experimental tests helped validate the design optimization framework and give us confidence that the optimal HXs will perform as intended. Specifically, our models accurately predicted the capacity within +/-10% of the measured values.

The conference was held virtually from July 26-28, 2021 and the award was announced at the closing ceremony.

Published October 15, 2021