A Fundamentally New Approach to Air-cooled Heat Exchangers

We describe breakthrough results obtained in a feasibility study of a fundamentally new architecture for air-cooled heat exchangers. In conventional “fan-plus-finned-heat-sink” air-cooled heat exchangers, the primary physical limitation to performance (i.e. achieving low thermal resistance) is the boundary layer of motionless air that adheres to and envelops all surfaces of the heat exchanger. Within this boundary layer region of “dead air”, diffusive transport is the dominant mechanism for heat transfer. The resulting thermal bottleneck largely determines the thermal resistance of the heat exchanger. No one has yet devised a practical solution to the boundary layer problem. Another longstanding problem is inevitable fouling of the heat exchanger surface over time by particulate matter and other airborne contaminants. Heat sink fouling is especially important in applications where little or no preventative maintenance is typically practiced. No one has yet devised a practical solution to this problem, either. The third major obstacle concerns inadequate airflow to heat exchanger resulting from restrictions on fan noise. Small and medium-sized fans have relatively poor mechanical efficiency; unproductive expenditure of mechanical work on the surrounding air results in high noise levels. Air conditioners, heat pumps, and refrigeration equipment account for nearly 20% of electricity consumption in the U.S. A longstanding but largely unrealized opportunity in energy efficiency concerns the performance of air-cooled heat exchangers used in such devices. In the case of residential air conditioners, for example, the typical performance of the air cooled heat exchangers used for condensers and evaporators is at best marginal from the standpoint the of achieving maximum the possible coefficient of performance (COP). If by some means it were possible to reduce the thermal resistance of these heat exchangers to a negligible level, a typical energy savings of order 30% could be immediately realized. It has long been known that a several-fold increase in heat exchanger size, in conjunction with the use of much higher volumetric flow rates, provides a straight-forward path to this goal, but is not practical from the standpoint of real world applications. The tension in the market place between the need for energy efficiency and logistical considerations such as equipment size, cost and operating noise has resulted in a compromise that is far from ideal. To date the prevailing wisdom has been that little can be done to improve this situation; the “fan-plus-finned-heat-sink” heat exchanger architecture used throughout the energy sector represents an extremely mature technology for which there is little opportunity for further optimization. A breakthrough in air-cooled heat exchanger would also have far reaching impact in the IT sector, from the standpoint of (1) solving the “Thermal Brick Wall” problem, which currently limits CPU clocks speeds to ~3 GHz, and (2) addressing increasing concern about the energy consumption of our nation’s information technology infrastructure (which recently surpassed that of the the aviation industry). Over 50% of the electrical power used in server farms and data centers is associated with electronics cooling, and IT sector power consumption is projected to double over the next several years. The air-cooled heat exchanger architecture described in this study is a fundamentally new approach that simultaneously eliminates all three of the drawbacks of conventional air-cooled heat exchanger technology. The “Air Bearing Heat Exchanger” provides a several-fold reduction in boundary layer thickness, intrinsic immunity to heat sink fouling, and drastic reductions in noise. It is also expected to be very practical from the standpoint of cost, complexity, ruggedness, etc.