UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Robinson, Franklin LeeSubject: search.filters.subject.carbon fiber

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    Thermomechanical Behavior of Polymer Composite Heat Exchangers
    (2011) Robinson, Franklin Lee; Bar-Cohen, Avram; Bruck, Hugh A; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Industrial cooling with seawater, particularly at elevated temperature and salinity, shortens the useful lives of conventional metallic heat exchangers. Cost effective, corrosion-resistant heat exchangers are required to fully utilize available saline water resources. Polymer composites, which use carbon fibers for thermal and mechanical reinforcement, are a promising material for such heat exchangers. The present thesis provides a characterization and thermomechanical analysis of heat exchangers fabricated using thermally conductive polymers. The change in mechanical properties resulting from exposure to saltwater at elevated temperature is characterized for raw and reinforced polymers. Then, thermal performance of such heat exchangers is compared to that of heat exchangers fabricated from conventional corrosion-resistant materials. Finally, the mechanical and combined thermomechanical response of such heat exchangers to conditions typical of LNG operations is studied and compared to that of heat exchangers fabricated from conventional corrosion-resistant materials.