according to a recent report from 3dprint.com, u.k.-based hieta technologies is working with british metrology company renishaw to move from prototyping to commercialization of its metal 3-d-printed heat exchangers.

a recuperator designed with 3-d printing by hieta technologies. (hieta technologies)

this is not the first time that the two companies have worked together to find an additive manufacturing solution to a production challenge. as the article noted, the companies also partnered on a microturbine range extender for electric vehicles and hieta has several patents in place for 3-d printed heat exchangers.

in a statement, hieta technologies lead project engineer stephen mellor said, ““with almost all of our projects, we are trying to light-weight components and solve thermal management issues. through our partnership with renishaw, we have produced components that are typically around 40% lighter and smaller by volume than anything equivalent that is available on the market.”

he added, “this is possible because, with the renishaw technology, we can design and manufacture many novel and high performing surfaces integrated into a single component. this would be very difficult to do with conventional methods.”

renishaw used its am250 system to 3-d print walls of the heat exchanger as thin as 150 microns. the samples were heat treated and characterized to confirm that the laser powder bed fusion process was effective.

“together with uk-based vehicle integrator delta motorsports, the two companies participated in two separate building projects, the first of which was a cuboid heat exchanger (recuperator) that could be used as an electric vehicle range extender,” the article explained. “the second project, a recuperator of annular form, had a goal of taking the component design to even more complex shapes than the traditional cuboid, as that can help lower costs, increase cycle efficiency and product performance, and offer packaging benefits.”

it took 17 days for the first component, but the companies have now gotten the process down to 80 hours. the component was 30 percent lighter and had 30 percent less volume, while meeting the heat transfer and pressure drop requirements.

the article continued, “hieta, in addition to optimizing renishaw’s equipment to handle larger samples, used the projects to create a process for extracting excess powder material from the heat exchanger cores, and the projects’ resulting fluid flow and thermal transfer data have also been incorporated in hieta’s computational fluid dynamics (cfd) and finite-element analysis (fea) programs.”