Developments in Heat Transfer

Dear Colleagues,

Worldwide regulations in the energy production and management field are thrusting the industry towards a reduction in pollutant emissions as part of the necessary strategy aimed at limiting the overall increase in the world’s temperature by 1.5°C, as per the Paris Agreement in 2015. To comply with the stringent limitations defined by lawmakers, researchers in the energy engineering field are continuously working to improve machines’ efficiency and to avoid energy waste. Amongst the fields of research associated with this topic, the design of heat exchangers, the thermal management of powertrains, and the design of innovative turbomachinery components play the most prominent role and contribute to defining ‘heat transfer’ as a pillar for future technologies and applications.

Additive manufacturing enables the creation of ultra-efficient and compact heat exchangers that are necessary to reduce the weight of power systems. Moreover, it entitles manufacturers to investigate innovative design solutions for specific components to improve the efficiency of the heat transfer, thus, enhancing the plant efficiency. Machine learning is currently used to define optimal strategies for the optimization of the powertrain thermal management and for the efficient exploitation of the on-board power energy sources. Specific attention is also paid to the battery management system (BMS) to achieve an efficient control of the thermal state of the battery. The latter would in fact impair the battery’s state of health and impact its residual life, thus, affecting the so-called range anxiety. Finally, optimization methods would also be coupled to high-fidelity methods in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to attain an efficient design of the cooling systems for combustors and turbines, including component interaction issues and acknowledging the tendency to move towards pressuregain cycles. Once more, additive manufacturing would represent an enabling technology to achieve such goals.

This Special Issue encourages researchers working in those fields to share their latest developments in heat transfer analysis, modelling, and simulation. Specific topics of interest for publication include the vehicular, aerospace and power generation applications of the following:

• Data-driven heat transfer models.
• Model-based heat transfer models.
• Hybrid heat transfer models.
• Data-driven physics-informed AI (artificial intelligence) models.
• Experimental methods for heat transfer analysis.
• Numerical methods for heat transfer simulation.
• Unsteady heat transfer in turbomachinery
• Cooling strategies for next-gen aero-engine components.

Dr. Daniela Anna Misul
Dr. Simone Salvadori
Guest Editors

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