IMPROVED MODELING APPROACH FOR HEAT SINK TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION

The ongoing pursuit for higher power densities in electronic devices poses severe demands on cooling solutions. To explore the full potential of liquid-cooled microchannel heat sinks, topology optimization has been proposed as a method to optimize the microchannel layout. This has led to novel tree-like microchannel layouts. However, deficiencies in the porous medium models used thus far often lead to designs with disconnected channels, that cannot be used in practice. In this contribution, a new modeling approach is proposed for microchannel based heat sink topology optimization. A virtual pressure is introduced in the solid phase of the topology. This pressure field together with a zero velocity field in the solid then can be used for the regularization of the binary design variable. As a result, continuous optimization techniques can be used. This leads to improved results compared to optimization based on porous medium models for the solid phase. Indeed, in the latter case small leakage flows through the solid need to be tolerated in the numerical implementation, leading to inaccurate thermal modeling or ill-conditioned matrix systems. The approach presented in this paper circumvents these problems. The absence of penetration in our new model is demonstrated by two benchmarks. Performance of this model for optimization is validated by a hydraulic inverse design problem.status: publishe