Development and design optimization of novel polymer heat exchanger using the multi-objective genetic algorithm

Recently, there has been great attention to find new materials of a heat exchanger to replace aluminum which has been typically used for a long time as a basic material of heat exchangers. In this context, polymeric materials are considered as candidates due to their characteristics of lightweight and excellent corrosion resistance. Despite substantial benefits of polymeric materials, there is a critical issue as used for the heat exchanger, which is the low heat transfer performance due to their extremely low thermal conductivity. In this study, to overcome this limitation, a novel polymer heat exchanger is proposed with the new heat flow design. The finless teardrop-shaped tube bundle polymer heat exchanger is newly designed and its thermal-hydraulic performances are investigated with experiments and simulations. Then, the geometries of the novel polymer heat exchanger are optimized to maximize the thermal and hydraulic performance by using the online approximation-assisted optimization technique.