New $3.7M DOE grant awarded to Qian and team

Congratulations to Mechanical Engineering’s Elmer R. and Janet Ambach Kaiser Professor and Associate Chair for Research Xiaoping Qian on his recently accepted award from the Department of Energy!

This project features synergistic collaboration among a major research university (UW-Madison), an industry leader (GE Research), and a DOE national lab (Sandia National Laboratory). UW co-principal investigators are ME faculty Mark Anderson, Greg Nellis, Dan Negrut, Jinlong Wu, and Michael Wagner.

Their project, Topology Optimization, Additive Manufacturing and Experimental Testing of Particle Heat Exchangers, includes proposed technology that aims to integrate topology optimization (TO) and additive manufacturing (AM) to develop a modular particle Heat Exchanger (pHX) for drastically improving heat transfer performance, manufacturability, cost effectiveness, and thermo-mechanical reliability. The combination of TO and AM allows the use of advanced heat transfer geometries and higher-temperature Silicon Carbide (SiC) materials in the pHX to increase heat transfer and lifetime. 

The funding provided by DOE through this project will lead to a drastic improvement in the heat transfer performance on the particle heat exchanger due to the use of novel heat transfer geometries that are optimized based particle flow physics and the user of higher-temperature materials (SiC).

Read more about the DOE Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) Concentrating Solar-Thermal Power (CSP) Fiscal Year 2022 Research, Development, and Demonstration funding program’s support of projects that accelerate the large-scale development and deployment of CSP technology for industrial decarbonization and electrical power generation and storage.