Numerical investigation on the effect of convex textured surface on thermal–hydraulic performance of gyroid-structured heat exchangers

The demand for efficient and compact heat exchangers increases in aerospace equipment thermal dissipation and data center cooling. Structures based on triply periodic minimal surfaces offer a high specific surface area and low flow resistance, representing a lightweight heat structure with excellent heat transfer performance. This paper investigates the gyroid structure, which is a type of triply periodic minimal surface. Convex textures are generated on gyroid-structured heat exchangers using the surface constrained Voronoi algorithm. This paper numerically investigates the effects of various heights of convex textures and the number of Voronoi cells on the thermal–hydraulic performance of gyroid-structured heat exchangers under Reynolds numbers from 2300 to 8900. A maximum increase of 34.11 % in heat transfer coefficient is achieved by the gyroid-structured heat exchanger with a convex texture height of 0.8 mm and 1000 convex-texture Voronoi cells, compared with the smooth gyroid heat exchanger at a Reynolds number of 6700. The performance evaluation coefficients of the gyroid-structured heat exchanger with convex textures all exceed 1. The gyroid-structured heat exchanger achieves an optimal performance evaluation coefficient of 1.286 when utilizing 600 convex texture Voronoi cells and a convex texture height of 0.8 mm. This study fills the research gap of gyroid-structured heat exchangers with convex textures and guides the enhancement of thermal–hydraulic performance in triply periodic minimal surface heat exchangers.