Mohammadreza Kadivar is a PhD researcher in I-Form and is based in IT Sligo working in the area of additive manufacture of Heat transfer surfaces. He received his bachelor’s degree in Power Plant Engineering. He then continued to obtain a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Shiraz University, Iran. After graduation, he has worked as a Mechanical Engineering Supervisor in MAPNA Turbine Engineering and Manufacturing Company for more than five years. His main research interests are heat transfer, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and additive manufacturing. His specific expertise is employing experimental and computational methods to perform research that targets enhanced heat transfer and improved energy efficiency. He participated in several research collaborations with different research institutes worldwide such as Shiraz University and Sahand University of Technology (Iran), Institute for Precision Machining KSF (Germany), Clean Energy Research Group in Pretoria University (South Africa), and Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory in Imperial College London, (UK). He has conducted research on various subjects comprising heat transfer in nanofluids, optimisation of thermal energy storage systems, and heat transfer in manufacturing processes.
Mohammadreza started his PhD with I-Form in February 2020 and is investigating heat transfer in internal cooling channels fabricated by Additive Manufacturing (AM). Significant reduction in the cycle time and shrinkage defects are the main advantages of using enhanced conformal cooling channels in injection moulding processes. Additive manufacturing allows the fabrication of highly modified and featured cooling channels with enhanced thermal performance. Enhanced features as well as surface roughness produced by additive manufacturing process improve transport phenomena such as heat and momentum. Surface roughness can be influenced by AM design parameters such as build direction and laser speed which can be used for fabricating artificial rough surfaces. Both numerical and experimental studies are performed to investigate surface roughness characteristics, heat transfer enhancement, increased flow turbulence, thermal performance, alternative fluid medium etc. Although the surface modification enhances heat transfer, this causes a pressure drop penalty, which leads to an increase in the required pumping power. Therefore, optimisation methods can also be deployed to optimise the parameter space.
Heat transfer devices play a significant role in most industries such as production, electronic cooling, energy storage, aerospace applications, etc. Heat transfer devices, especially two-phase devices, can face performance limitations imposed by physical processes, which occur at the fluid/surface interface. AM has shown promise in creating modified surfaces such as artificial roughness and enhanced features which result in an improvement in heat transfer. AM processes also facilitate the production of the entire heat transfer device, eliminating several production steps and resulting in simpler device manufacture, easy customisation, yet retaining high thermal performance.
The adoption of additive manufacturing technology to fabricate thermal management systems in a one-step manufacturing process will lead to significant disruption in the design of cooling devices. This technology permits the development of products with free-form complex 3D geometries. AM process provides superior flexibility and complex shapes, such as internal cooling channels or porous structures that are not achievable by traditional manufacturing methods.