The Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs in Figure 1) were originally developed for naval propulsion purposes, and then adapted to land-based applications. It has three parts: the reactor coolant system, the steam generator and the condenser. The Steam generator (a yellow area in Figure 1) is a shell and tube heat exchanger with high-pressure primary water passing through the tube side and lower pressure secondary feed water as well as steam passing through the shell side. Therefore, a key issue in increasing the efficiency of heat exchanger is to improve the design of steam generator, which is directly translated into economic benefits. The past research works show that the presence of a pin-fin array in a channel enhances the heat transfer significantly. Hence, using microfabrication techniques, such as LIGA, micro-molding or electroplating, some special microstructures can be fabricated around the tubes in the heat exchanger to increase the heat-exchanging efficiency and reduce the overall size of the heat-exchanger for the given heat transfer rates. In this paper, micro-pin fins of different densities made of SU-8 photoresist are fabricated and studied to evaluate overall heat transfer efficiency. The results show that there is an optimized micro pin-fin configuration that has the bestmore » overall heat transfer effects.« less
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