A TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION APPROACH APPLIED TO MICROCHANNEL HEAT SINK DESIGN

Fluid flow in small channels are widely present and have many applications for transportation and irrigation systems, biological fluid conduction, and thermal fields, specially in heat sinks since it allows obtaining an efficient device design having better thermal dissipation with small mass and volume, and large convective heat transfer coefficient. This work presents an optimization methodology to design micro-channels applied to heat sink for electronic cooling devices. In this application, maximum dimensions are up to a few millimeters, and the flow velocities are low, retrieving a typical Stokes flow behavior. This methodology is developed by using the Topology Optimization (TO) method, which application in multi-physics problems has been shown a very promising area. This method combines Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and the optimization algorithm called Sequential Linear Programming (SLP) to find, systematically, optimum layout design for the channel heat sinks. Essentially, the optimization problem applied to channel fluid flow consists of determining which points of a given design domain (small heat sink) should be fluid, and which points should be solid to maximize the convective resistance, with minimum pressure drop. The proposed optimization process considers the velocity field distribution and its influence over the temperature distribution, combining both thermal and fluidic fields through a multi-objective function. It is implemented in software, using MATLAB language, and some computational results are shown to illustrate the method.