Overview
Heat exchangers have a fundamental role in aviation engineering. Heat exchanger development is ever in progress, to reduce the heat exchanger volume and to enhance the performances. Although the F-gas II regulation does not yet apply to the aeronautical field, actions are being taken by the entire industry to reduce the environmental footprint of air traffic and investigate the use of low GWP refrigerants. Currently, multiphasic heat exchanger headers have mainly been designed and optimized with an empirical approach and an experimental validation. And the multiphasic heat exchanger core is up-to-now designed with experimental-based correlations, all obtained with the high GWP fluids.
PANTHER project totally fits in the breakthrough requirements, taking advantage of the new optimization strategy of headers coupled with innovative CFD models of the heat exchanger core. The greatest strength of the PANTHER project is close collaboration of the CFD model development together with the experimental facilities for an optimum validation.
PANTHER project will carry out numerical simulations to optimize multiphasic heat exchanger performances: through a 3D CFD porous media model taking into account phase change phenomena and fin structures. For the optimization, topological optimization and adjoint methods will be assessed.
To validate the developed CFD models, PANTHER will design, construct, and characterize and two experimental facilities;
- The adiabatic experimental set-up will validate the adiabatic multiphasic porous media model
- The multiphasic experimental set-up will validate the multiphasic porous media model with heat and mass transfer model, and validate also the optimization chain methodology. The facility will work with an air mass flow range of 0.01 kg/s to 0 0.5 kg/s, an air temperature range of [-10:60°C], refrigerant flow range up to 80 g/s. The chosen fluid for testing is R1234ze.