Modine announces collaboration on heat exchanger technology

RACINE - Modine Manufacturing Co. Tuesday announced a collaboration with Sierra SpA, a European producer of finned pack heat exchangers for use in civil and industrial applications.
Modine said the collaboration will provide Modine's patented Parallel Flow microchannel heat exchanger technology within Europe.
Racine-based Modine said the relationship will enable both Modine and Sierra to expand their capabilities within the European commercial heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration market.
Modine, with fiscal 2009 revenues of $1.4 billion, specializes in thermal management systems and components. Its products are used in light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment, off-highway and industrial equipment, refrigeration systems, and fuel cells.
The company employs approximately 6,000 people at 32 facilities worldwide in 15 countries. For more information about Modine's Commercial Products Group, visit http://www.ModineHVAC.com.
http://www.journaltimes.com/news/local/article_2574d6e6-368c-11df-8be9-001cc4c03286.html

Swap metal heat exchangers for plastic

HEAT exchangers could one day be made from polyethylene after engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found a way to make it conduct heat very efficiently in one direction.

Carrying heat in one direction is not a property associated with polymers, or even metals used to make heat exchangers used today, which conduct heat equally well in all directions. The MIT team found that they could make heat travel in a straight line along a polymer fibre if they could make all the molecules in the fibre line up unidirectionally, rather than forming a jumbled mass as is the norm.

In the first stage of the production process, the team slowly drew a polyethylene fibre out of a heated solution using the finely controllable cantilever of an atomic force microscope. In the second stage it was heated once more to restretch it. “Once it solidifies at room temperature, you can't do any large deformation,” says lead author Sheng Shen, “so we heat it up twice.”

The resulting fibre was around 300 times more thermally conductive than normal polyethylene making it the highest thermal conductivity ever seen in any polymer. The team says this outperforms almost half of all pure metals, including iron and platinum.

The team will now work to scale up its production process, which has so far only produced individual fibres. The team thinks modified polyethylene could eventually replace the metals used in heat exchanger fins, solar hot water collectors and microchips.
http://www.tcetoday.com/tcetoday/NewsDetail.aspx?nid=12583

Heat exchanger tech crucial to new automotive hydrogen storage system

Researchers have completed work on a crucial component for an experimental hydrogen storage system for cars, part of efforts to reduce pollution and the use of fossil fuels in transportation.
The system uses a fine metal powder to absorb hydrogen gas under high pressure. When the powder absorbs hydrogen, it becomes a "metal hydride," and the process is called "hydriding." By then decreasing the pressure in the vessel or warming the metal hydride, the hydrogen can be released to drive a fuel cell or engine.
A complication in perfecting the technology, however, is that the hydriding process generates heat, which hinders the absorption process and prevents the hydrogen storage vessel from being filled rapidly, said Issam Mudawar, a Purdue University professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the work with research assistant professor Timothée Pourpoint and doctoral student Milan Visaria.
"If you're driving your hydrogen car, you can't wait an hour at the filling station," Mudawar said. "For this system to be practical, you have to be able to cool the hydride efficiently so that the storage vessel can be filled within five minutes with enough fuel to drive 300 miles."
The researchers have made progress in solving the problem by designing, building and testing the system's heat exchanger and circulating coolant through tubes to remove heat and speed hydrogen storage, Mudawar said.
The engineers filed a final patent in February for the heat exchanger, a coil of stainless steel tubing that fits inside a hydrogen storage "pressure vessel" 4 inches in diameter. Standard automotive coolant is circulated through the tubing.
Such a storage technology could help make hydrogen cars a reality if other researchers are successful in developing improved alloys for hydriding and better fuel cells, which generate electricity to power an electric motor. The hydrogen also could be burned instead of gasoline in internal combustion engines.
Due to space constraints, it is essential that the heat exchanger occupy the least volume possible inside the storage vessel. Using a theoretical model they developed, the researchers determined how to precisely position the tubing so that no fins are needed to dissipate heat.
Eliminating the fins reduces the cost, weight and size of the heat exchanger, Mudawar said.
The researchers designed a system that occupies the least space possible while also properly cooling the hydride. Whereas an earlier prototype occupied 30 percent of the vessel, leaving 70 percent for the metal hydride, the new design occupies 7 percent, leaving 93 percent for the hydride.
"The idea behind this latest design is to provide the coolant as close as possible to the hydride while eliminating the need for bulky heat spreading components like fins," Mudawar said. "The main advantages of this design are simplicity and flexibility. It can easily be adapted depending on cooling and size requirements."
The work was conducted in Purdue's Hydrogen Systems Laboratory at the university's Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories.
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2010/02/Manufacturing-Materials-Engineering-Purdue-Heat-exchanger-tech-crucial-to-new-automotive-hydrogen-storage-system/

Air Products to supply LNG heat exchangers for Australia's Gorgon Project

Industrial gases and chemicals supplier Air Products (NYSE:  APD | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) has signed an agreement to provide multiple liquefied natural gas (LNG) heat exchangers for the Gorgon Project offshore Western Australia, the company said on Thursday.
Under the agreement with Chevron Australia Pty Ltd, Air Products will supply its proprietary LNG process technology and equipment for three process trains producing up to 15 million tons of LNG per annum at the Gorgon Project.
Air Products will provide three separate units of its proprietary propane pre-cooled mixed refrigerant process using the SplitMR machinery configuration.
LNG production at the site is scheduled to start in 2014.

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exchangers-for-australia-s-gorgon-project-720674.html

Heat exchanger contract is a joint effort

Two UK companies recently combined forces to provide a solution for the oil and gas industry that they belive could not have been achieved anywhere else in the world.

Heatric of Poole in Dorset designs and manufactures compact diffusion-bonded heat exchangers for offshore and onshore gas applications. As part of a £multimillion process order in the Middle East, Heatric constructed the exchanger cores from 6% molybdenum stainless steel for corrosion resistance to a sour gas working environment.

Redditch-based Harper and Simmons, a specialist toolmaking company with one of the most extensive large-capacity wire eroding facilities in the world, provided the chipless machining solution that Heatric required to guarantee clear small fluid flow channels, vital to the compact core design.
Heatric believes it is the only company in the world capable of diffusion bonding stainless steel on such a large scale and that Harper and Simmons was the only supplier with sufficient capacity in size and quantity of wire cutting machinery to be able to meet the lead times and requirements of this Heatric project.
Almost 10,000 hours of cutting time were required for the project; 166,000mm being cut at a cutting speed of 0.3mm per minute due to the extreme thickness of the materials. Harper and Simmons’ facilities include what it believes to be the world’s largest number of super-size Hitachi bridge-type wire eroders under one roof; the only machines capable of accommodating the capacity and the weight of the Heatric components. In addition, heavy lifting craneage to transfer the non-magnetic material from machine to machine along with full toolroom back-up provided a turnkey solution for Heatric unavailable anywhere else in the UK or overseas.
“The innovative design of Heatrics’ heat exchange core and the wire cutting capacity of Harper and Simmons in supply partnership ensured the quality and delivery required for the end user,” says Michael Yorke, operations manager at Heatric.

Robert Simmons, managing director of Harper and Simmons

Robert Simmons, managing director of Harper and Simmons adds: “Conventional cutting forces produced by a milling operation would have been totally unsuitable for this particular job because of burnishing the flow channels. Wire eroding, on the other hand, produces a super precision slice to both ends of the heat exchanger leaving a completely clean core. At one point, most of our machines were cutting 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the needs of this one project. If there’s any doubt that British industry is dead, then here’s a great example to prove that is absolutely not the case.”
Harper and Simmons’ state-of-the-art water jetting facilities, which include one of the few three-axis cutters in the UK, are also meeting the challenging cutting demands of Heatric’s exotic high-tech alloys.
http://www.engineeringcapacity.com/archive101/2009/december/industry_news/heat_exchanger_contract_is_a_joint_effort

Dana develops new heat exchanger for electric vehicles

Dana Holding, a US-based supplier of axle, driveshaft and thermal products for vehicle manufacturers, has developed Long heat exchanger designed to extend battery life in hybrid and electric vehicles.

The company said the heat exchanger has recently debuted on Tesla Motors's 2010 all-electric Roadster Sport car. The heat-exchange technology cools the Roadster's battery by transferring heat generated within the battery to the vehicle's climate-control system.
In addition, a temperature sensor mount provides continuous feedback to the climate-control system. The interface reportedly helps to maintain the battery's ideal temperature during operation, thus helping to extend battery life.
Dana engineers have constructed the heat exchanger using a patented aluminum brazing process, ensuring cleanliness of both the climate control and battery coolant fluids. Dana is manufacturing the heat exchanger at its advanced engineering center at Oakville in Ontario, Canada.
Jim Sweetnam, president and CEO of Dana, said: "Dana is committed to providing our best-in-class engineering and manufacturing expertise to electric-vehicle manufacturers such as Tesla Motors. Our advanced battery technology solutions will help drive our growth in this exciting market segment."

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Emerson ships rear door heat exchanger

Emerson is shpping the Liebert XDR, a rear-door heat exchanger that removes heat from IT racks before it ever enters the data center.

The Liebert XDR microchannel heat exchangers are mounted in a moveable door, which is fixed to a frame attached to the rear of the rack. It relies on server fans for hot air movement across a cooling coil, utilizing a pumped refrigerant that is 700 percent more efficient at removing heat than water. The pumped refrigerant also eliminates any danger of equipment damage from water leakage. Air exits the Liebert XDR at approximately the same temperature as the air entering the front of the rack, neutralizing the heat created by the servers.

 “Because the Liebert XDR cools the air exiting the rack before it enters the room, there is no need for fans to move heat across the room to wall or floor-mounted cooling systems,” said Bob Blough, director of product marketing, Liebert precision cooling, Emerson Network Power.

“Eliminating the cooling fans makes it possible for businesses to realize energy savings of 35 to 48 percent compared to perimeter cooling – let alone the capital cost savings from not needing to expand or build a new facility.”

Feature include ability to cool up to 20 kW of rack load, even in a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration. The door opens more than 100 degrees and allows for side-by-side placement of racks in open and closed positions.

A flexible connection of hard-piped, pumped-refrigerant lines through the rack door’s hinge pivot points, which enables it to be robust and leak-free through more than one million repeated door openings and extended periods of time with no movement. These overhead piping connections are completely static – no moving components will interfere with opening or closing the door.

Pumped refrigerant from a Liebert XDP or Liebert XDC enters the fixed frame and passes through an innovative hinge to the door.

The product has been shipping for the last year as the Sun Microsystems SCD5600.
Jack Pouchet of Emerson will talking about the firm's St. Louis data center on Day 1 at DatacenterDynamics London and be taking part in a panel discussion on renewable energy on Day 2. Details on the link below.
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=news&mod=News&mid=9A02E3B96F2A415ABC72CB5F516B4C10&tier=3&nid=3EF0365BE1A447B6A485D5AD975FC273