Experimental and numerical characterization of pure copper heat sinks produced by laser powder bed fusion

Abstract

One of the technological challenges aimed at improving the cyclotron-based radionuclides’(RNs) supply for Nuclear Medicine (NM), is the availability of proper heat sink systems able to remove the large amount of heat deposited during the irradiation stage onto isotope-enriched targets. In this regard, three different non-standard mockup configurations, made of pure copper by means of the Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LBPF) technique, have been tested with an in-house developed experimental apparatus. The experimental characterization has subsequently been compared with numerical results carried out by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. Our numerical model, based on the Re-Normalization Group (RNG) k-epsilon formulation, has shown close agreement (within 1.06 % Mean Absolute Error) with the experimental results, despite the geometrical complexity of the heat sinks prototypes. The combined experimental and numerical approach, together with the flexibility of additive manufacturing production, was proved to be apt for further development of high-efficiency heat exchange applications in this field.

Keywords

• Laser powder bed fusion
• Pure copper additive manufacturing
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Heat sink
• Nuclear physics
• Liquid cooling