Graphite foam radiator

[shelly]

Found this old article

http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cpr/rpt/106741_.pdf

form page 8 demonstrates the dramatic performace increase of a Nascar radiator.
The article is very old though; does any one have more recent news about this technology?

Also found this: it seems it is studied still

http://www.energy.lth.se/fileadmin/ener ... 110928.pdf

[Just_a_fan]

Just flicked over it. Interesting stuff. What comes to mind is the recent info coming out about graphene. This has a very high thermal conductivity (I think I've seen it quoted as being the highest known). The addition of graphite (from which graphene can be isolated) greatly increased the thermal conductivity of the core material.

Makes me wonder if they actually ended up with graphene or some derivative of graphene in the cores when they used graphitic foam.

Fascinating stuff graphene: a thin film about a hair's thickness will let water vapour escape as if the film wasn't there but will prevent helium from escaping. Bizarre!

[shelly]

reading the whole thesis it seems that the main disadvantage of the technology is a drag coefficient more than double than a traditional radiator, that counters the size and weight advantages.

[PhillipM]

Be bloody fantastic for me though, pity it'll cost the same price as my house to have a radiator made

[n smikle]

A nice read.

[Belatti]

reading the whole thesis it seems that the main disadvantage of the technology is a drag coefficient more than double than a traditional radiator, that counters the size and weight advantages.

I guess thats because the foam manufacturing technique needs a little R+D

[riff_raff]

Graphite foam as a heat exchanger material is one of those things that looks great on paper, but has lots of difficult problems in practice. Graphite foam obviously looks attractive for lightweight heat exchangers due to its low density and excellent thermal conductivity. But it is difficult to fabricate and galvanically incompatible with most light metal alloys.

Here's a company making metal heat exchangers using a novel design:

http://www.mezzotech.com/index.html