A synergic topology optimization approach on distribution of cooling channels and diverse-intensity heat sources for liquid-cooled heat sink

The liquid-cooled heat sink is an effective and robust cooling device and has been widely used in the industry. The fluid-thermal topology optimization approaches have been adopted for the heat sink design by many researchers. However, none of these works considered the optimization of heat source distribution. This work focuses on the synergic design of the cooling channels and the layout of heat sources with diverse intensities. A hybrid topology optimization approach is adopted, in which the channels are implicitly described with pseudo-density while the heat sources are considered as moving components. The maximum temperature of the system is taken as the objective and constrained by the fluid power dissipation. In order to avoid unrealistic designs such as suspended structures, the stiffness of the structure is considered as a constraint. Considering when heat sources have diverse intensities, the initial locations of the heat sources could significantly affect the optimal result. Aiming at this problem, a heuristic algorithm that can redistribute the heat sources efficiently during the optimization process by exchanging their locations is developed. The topology optimization is performed with a parallel solver developed in Open Field Operation And Manipulation (OpenFOAM) framework. The numerical tests show that the influence of the heat source distribution on the cooling performance could be even higher than the cooling channel design, and the synergic topology optimization method is an effective way to design high-performance heat sink.