TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION OF FORCED CONVECTIVE MINI/MICRO SCALE HEAT SINKS

Abstract

Thermofluid devices are widely seen in industry, for example, heat sinks, heat exchangers, solar thermal collectors, etc. The traditional design method is mostly dependent on experience of engineers or researchers. In current study, topology optimization, a numerical design method, is developed and applied to design three thermofluid devices: fluid headers, minichannel air-cooled heat sinks and microchannel water-cooled heat sinks. A multi-stage optimization strategy is developed to alleviate the modeling inaccuracy problem in topology optimization. For heat sink optimization, a 2D thermofluid model is first developed as a representation of full 3D numerical simulation to reduce computational cost. The optimized results are compared with traditional designs and their performance superiority proves the effectiveness of the topology optimization method. Furthermore, a fin pattern is derived from some similar topology optimized microchannel water-cooled heat sinks and its thermohydraulic characteristics are analyzed in detail.