One of the interesting stories to come out of the latest COMSOL News concerned a couple of great researchers, Dr. Ozgur Yildirim and Dr. Zihong Guo, and how they use simulations in their inventing process. They work in an invention/prototype laboratory in Bellevue, WA for Intellectual Ventures, a global leader in the business of invention.
Intellectual Ventures operates by buying, collaborating, or developing their own ideas to then nurture them to become a viable invention. Once an invention has been ascertained to have promise, they then supply it to other companies to license, market and sell.
What made this interesting to me was their job; being able to work on different cutting edge inventions — some of them hardly imaginable — and then see them to fruition. Once that work is done, they get to do it all again. Ozgur gave a great summary of many of the different inventions Intellectual Ventures has been working with lately in his presentation at the latest COMSOL Conference.
The story in COMSOL News concerns a microchannel heat exchanger with high efficiency. Being regenerative, it re-utilizes a lot of the heat emanating from a process stream, and reaches efficiencies of 90%.
They were able to investigate the effect of primary design variables on the device performance and to interpret the experimental results obtained from physical prototypes. They also looked at other parameters than just the heat exchange efficiencies, such as the structural integrity of their invention. Read more about it here.
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