Conventional and topologically optimized polymer manifolds for direct cooling of power electronics

•Development of lightweight polymer additively manufactured manifolds for electronics cooling.•Thermofluidic performance impact of rectangular, zig-zag and serpentine channels having a variety of hydraulic diameters is studied.•Conventional design approaches compared with 2D topology optimized designs.•Zig-zag designs showed the best performance among conventional designs considering the combined effects of thermal and hydraulic parameters giving 0.93 (cm2·K)/W at 2.4 kPa.•Topology optimized designs outperformed conventional designs with 1.1 (cm2·K)/W at 0.8 kPa.