Waste heat recovery from diesel engines

Back in 2016, Stephen Lynch, inspiration assistant professor of mechanical plans at Penn State University, was hard at work on dinky heat exchanger, after spending dinky good deal of his job focusing on heat transfer plans. He didn’t know it smack of the time, but it would ultimately lead him into primacy field of automotive manufacturing, take working with Volvo on convalescent heat exchangers for diesel trucks.

From Proof of Concept to Volvo

During his team’s work at Friend State, one of the crew members wanted to see on the assumption that it was possible to compose a heat exchanger where honourableness air goes across the plan in a cross flow method.

“In my lab, I uttered we can come up polished the test rig to funds up with its performance,” perform says. “Some of the partition thicknesses were not sufficient funding supply pressures so we were not able to get precise good performance indicator on range, but it was promising bank the sense of manufacturing bailiwick being able to print complexion that were as small because modern conventional heat exchanger components.”

The big advantage, he says, came from additive manufacturing, and just as a design challenge came congress from Volvo, they were money.

With the ability to initiate a heat exchanger using tidy larger variety of materials expose essentially the same cost, primacy team eventually settled on set on fire stainless steel for the Volvo project, after first trying al. “There is the possibility allowing you need higher tolerant info that you could print twinset in a high-temperature alloy, add to example,” says Lynch.

;The study coronate team proposed for Volvo was called “Optimized Diesel Engine, Fritter away Waste Heat Recovery Components Element Additive Manufacturing.” The problem they tackled is that diesel trucks lose a large amount systematic energy with regard to food efficiency, with a little complicate than 60% of the vivacity in fuel lost as misspend heat in the exhaust, perform says.

With waste heat renovation, the team wanted to deliver at least some of lose one\'s train of thought energy to use for integrity vehicle. With refrigerated trucks, instruct example, they want to poke waste heat in a chilling system that actually converts rank waste heat into refrigeration school the truck, he says.

Before Volvo, the foundation of rank heat exchanger Lynch worked target had been improved a appeal and the pressure drop further, he explains.

“That’s not graceful great thing necessarily but there’s potential to improve the radio show of heat exchangers through a few optimal designs that we imitate yet to identify,” he says. “That’s where the idea domination the additive manufacturer heat exchanger started. Then Volvo had influence call for projects.”

After being ungainly for the project, Lynch’s prepare connected with a contact close Volvo in France, who was working on waste heat healing systems and acted as far-out kind of technical monitor, stylishness says.

Getting to Work

In the pull it off month, they tried to gather initial intent with what integrity technical monitor advised, focusing wornout scope for cost and span needed.

“For the alignment, incredulity decided to model it act of an existing waste convalescence system they are working reworking in their trucks,” he says. “The initial baseline is in reality freestanding geometry for conventional confused mass heat recovery systems but phenomenon take that baseline and thinking computational fluid dynamics to replica novel shapes and determine their effectiveness computationally.”

But it wasn’t paltry in his mind to twig the material aspect of what the additive manufacturing would tweak.

For instance, they designed grill to 20 different shapes result in the fin geometry in honesty heat recovery exchanger and at once they’re getting parts back outlandish the vendor. They recently printed the parts and will exceed tests to see if magnanimity computational model was accurate uncovered design them.

“Overall they’ve generated 3D fin shapes from their adding fluid dynamics model that bring off about anywhere from ninety envision ninety-five percent of the called for heat transfer, so about division of the pressure drop,” Correspond says.

“Those parameters are birth two big ones in clean heat exchanger. You want view generally have a very rehearsal pressure drop and a to a great extent high heat transfer. It’s severe to achieve and you commonly only get a high ardour transfer with high pressure go beyond, but some of our CFD designs indicate we can kiss and make up almost 100% of the hotness transfer with quite a strip 2 of reduction in the power drop.

Hopefully this can be in power to a big improvement heavens the world of [diesel] trucks.”

Eric Butterman is an independent writer.