Theses and dissertations

This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students. 

Displaying 1 - 2 of 2
Filtering by

Clear all filters

157692-Thumbnail Image.png

Investigating 3-D Printed Polymer Heat Exchanger

Description
Additive manufacturing, also known as 3-dimensional (3-d) printing, is now a rapidly growing manufacturing technique. Innovative and complex designs in various aspects of engineering have called for more efficient manufacturing techniques and 3-d printing has been a perfect choice in that direction. This research investigates the use of additive manufacturing…

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3-dimensional (3-d) printing, is now a rapidly growing manufacturing technique. Innovative and complex designs in various aspects of engineering have called for more efficient manufacturing techniques and 3-d printing has been a perfect choice in that direction. This research investigates the use of additive manufacturing in fabricating polymer heat exchangers and estimate their effectiveness as a heat transfer device. Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Stereolithography (SLA) are the three 3-d printing techniques that are explored for their feasibility in manufacturing heat exchangers. The research also explores a triply periodic minimal structure–the gyroid, as a heat exchanger design. The performance of the gyroid heat exchanger was studied using experiments. The main parameters considered for the experiments were heat transfer rate, effectiveness and pressure drop. From the results obtained it can be inferred that using polymers in heat exchangers helps reducing corrosion and fouling problems, but it affects the effectiveness of the heat exchangers. For our design, the maximum effectiveness achieved was 0.1. The pressure drop for the heat exchanger was observed to decrease with an increase in flow rate and the maximum pressure drop measured was 0.88 psi for a flow rate of 5 LPM.
ContributorsDanayat, Swapneel Shailesh (Author) / Phelan, Patrick (Thesis advisor) / Kwon, Beomjin (Committee member) / Azeredo, Bruno (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
157667-Thumbnail Image.png

Thermal and Vibration Characterization of Flexible Heat Sinks

Description
In nature, it is commonly observed that animals and birds perform movement-based thermoregulation activities to regulate their body temperatures. For example, flapping of elephant ears or plumage fluffing in birds. Taking inspiration from nature and to explore the possibilities of such heat transfer enhancements, augmentation of heat transfer rates induced…

In nature, it is commonly observed that animals and birds perform movement-based thermoregulation activities to regulate their body temperatures. For example, flapping of elephant ears or plumage fluffing in birds. Taking inspiration from nature and to explore the possibilities of such heat transfer enhancements, augmentation of heat transfer rates induced by the vibration of solid and well as novel flexible pinned heatsinks were studied in this research project. Enhancement of natural convection has always been very important in improving the performance of the cooling mechanisms. In this research, flexible heatsinks were developed and they were characterized based on natural convection cooling with moderately vibrating conditions. The vibration of heated surfaces such as motor surfaces, condenser surfaces, robotic arms and exoskeletons led to the motivation of the development of heat sinks having flexible fins with an improved heat transfer capacity. The performance of an inflexible, solid copper pin fin heat sink was considered as the baseline, current industry standard for the thermal performance. It is expected to obtain maximum convective heat transfer at the resonance frequency of the flexible pin fins. Current experimental results with fixed input frequency and varying amplitudes indicate that the vibration provides a moderate improvement in convective heat transfer, however, the flexibility of fins had negligible effects.
ContributorsPrabhu, Saurabh (Author) / Rykaczewski, Konrad (Thesis advisor) / Phelan, Patrick (Committee member) / Wang, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019