Prototype development of an innovative heat exchanger for an aircraft engine cooling system made by Additive Manufacturing (SLM).

The object of the following dissertation is the design of a prototype of an innovative heat exchanger (HE) for an aircraft engine cooling system made by Additive Manufacturing (SLM). The new shape design is referred to the inner core of the compact HE to enhance the convective heat transfer coefficient and reduce, at same time, the pressur drop occurred across the ducts of the block. The compact heat hexchanger is embedded in the engine, as part of the cooling system of the aircraft built by I.C.P. Aziazione srl. In fact this work is the summary of my Master Thesis that I have done in stage The stage started in september 2018 and ended in february 2019. The first part of the work begin with the analisys of the actual HE and evaluation of its performance and the novel shape cad design proposal to enhance performance too. The second step regards construction of the heat exchanger by additive manufacturing technique, in particular Selective Laser Melting provided by AIDRO srl, a 3D printing company located in Varese. The collaboration with them started by sharing the Solidworks CAD model of the component builded up by me and sent to the factory for the integration and printing. I can summarise the main goal of the master thesis as follow. First step: preliminary research about the state of the art of the heat exchanger for industrial application and, simultaneously, the study of the heat transfer phisical principles. Then, through considering contraints and output performances required by the HE, the design of an innovative and better performing core to supply the leakage exposed by ICP's engineers. The result was a CAD model containing the assembly of the HE, delivered as ready to AIDRO for the printing process. The last step will be test and validation of the new prototype on the engine. Preliminary validation takes place thanks to a CFD simulation provided by StarCCM+ software.