Caroline McConnell & Georg Pingen
Undergraduate Research Spring 2011 - Spring 2013
Caroline McConnell has worked with Dr. Pingen on the development and implementation of a pseudo 3D thermal-fluidic topology optimization in order to determine optimal design for heat sinks. Caroline used Matlab to implement the pseudo 3D flow solver using the lattice Boltzmann method and a dual-layer topology optimization framework as illustrated in the figure.
The developed optimization framework was tested using the design of a heat sink as shown in the figure below. Blue represents prescribed fluid regions to reduce inlet and outlet effects. Red represents prescribed solid material. Flow is driven by a pressure difference between the inlet and outlet. The objective is to maximize the heat transfer from the thermal base-layer. Analytically, an optimal number of straight fins can be determined assuming flow between parallel plates.
Using a heat sink design with 7 possible fins as shown, an optimal design was determined with 3 active heat sink fins as shown in the following figures, which illustrate the design iteration process as well as the velocity and temperature distribution for the final design. For additional details, the interested reader is referred to Caroline's poster (.pdf) from the ASME conference or the full paper (.pdf) published in the proceedings for the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition 2012 - IMECE2012.
