Additive Heat Exchanger Advancement

Traditional manufacturing of aerospace heat exchangers is time-intensive and has a high rate of manufacturing failure. Additive manufacturing heat exchangers would allow for single part construction, reducing potential points of failure. Additive manufacturing also greatly reduces the time needed to create prototypes and allows for a significantly more complex design.

The team designed, tested and produced an additive manufactured heat exchanger prototype to meet sponsor requirements. They also created a material and machine agnostic repeatable workflow package to allow customers to replicate and continue to develop the submitted design. The team also designed and constructed a testing apparatus for verifying that the heat exchanger can meet its requirements. The test equipment can verify the water flow, temperature, pressure and internal integrity. The team also created a verification procedure utilizing the modular testing apparatus in multiple forms.