Housings with Internal Cooling Channels Produced by Selective Laser Melting

This article is devoted to the development, manufacture, and testing of a cooling system produced by selective laser melting (SLM). The cooling system is a housing with a flat internal cooling channel (coil). Another option is to produce such housings by machining and casting, but this is a laborious process, requiring the manufacture of individual components and their subsequent assembly. By selective laser melting, such components with complex internal channels may be produced in one piece. The finite-element calculations take account of turbulence of the coolant flow and also of heat transfer. On the basis of the calculations, the geometric outline of the cooling channel is derived. The manufactured housing is tested, and the results are compared with the results of numerical modeling. The agreement is good.