Waste heat recovery from diesel engines

Back in 2016, Stephen Lynch, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State University, was hard at work on a heat exchanger, after spending a good deal of his career focusing on heat transfer engineering.

He didn’t know it at the time, but it would ultimately lead him into the field of automotive manufacturing, and working with Volvo on improving heat exchangers for diesel trucks.

From Proof of Concept to Volvo

During his team’s work at Penn State, one of the team members wanted to see if it was possible to create a heat exchanger where the air goes across the device in a cross flow direction.

“In my lab, I said we can come up with the test rig to come up with its performance,” he says. “Some of the wall thicknesses were not sufficient for supply pressures so we were not able to get a good performance indicator on that, but it was promising in the sense of manufacturing technology b