Roughness Effects on Flow and Heat Transfer for Additively Manufactured Channels

Recent technological advances in the field of additive manufacturing (AM), particularly with direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), have increased the potential for building gas turbine components with AM. Using the DMLS for turbine components broadens the design space and allows for increasingly small and complex geometries to be fabricated with little increase in time or cost. Challenges arise when attempting to evaluate the advantages of the DMLS for specific applications, particularly because of how little is known regarding the effects of surface roughness. This paper presents pressure drop and heat transfer results of flow through small, as produced channels that have been manufactured using the DMLS in an effort to better understand roughness. Ten different coupons made with the DMLS all having multiple rectangular channels were evaluated in this study. Measurements were collected at various flow conditions and reduced to a friction factor and a Nusselt number. Results showed significant augmentation of these parameters compared to smooth channels, particularly with the friction factor for minichannels with small hydraulic diameters. However, augmentation of Nusselt number did not increase proportionally with the augmentation of the friction factor.