A MODIFIED PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION AND ITS APPLICATION IN THERMAL MANAGEMENT OF AN ELECTRONIC COOLING SYSTEM

ii Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is an evolutionary computation technique, which has been inspired by the group behavior of animals such as schools of fish and flocks of birds. It has shown its effectiveness as an efficient, fast and simple method of optimization. The applicability of PSO in the design optimization of heat sinks is studied in this thesis. The results show that the PSO is an appropriate optimization tool for use in heat sink design. PSO has common problems that other evolutionary methods suffer from. For example, in some cases premature convergence can occur where particles tend to be trapped at local optima and not able to escape in seeking the global optimum. To overcome these problems, some modifications are suggested and evaluated in the present work. These modifications are found to improve the convergence rate and to enhance the robustness of the method. The specific modifications developed for PSO and evaluated in the thesis are