Heat spreading effect on the optimal geometries of cooling structures in a manifold heat sink

Abstract

Embedded cooling is a promising solution to address thermal challenges of power electronics. The present work investigates heat spreading effect on the optimal geometries of cooling structures within a single-phase manifold heat sink in laminar regime by integration of topology optimization (TO) and Bayesian optimization (BO). Such integration is for the manual parameter tuning issue in the density-based TO of conjugate heat transfer, and the TO process is accelerated by using a dual-level simulator and the optimality criteria optimizer combined with the stochastic gradient descent method. The heat spreading effect significantly alters the optimal geometries, due to the change of thermal resistance constitutions. Physical analyses on the BO-TO-generated geometries give two guidelines for improving the cooling structures here: (a) Heat source-coolant distance should increase properly for narrow heating area and small Biot number; (b) Highly-thermal-conductivity solid can be filled into low-velocity regions directly connecting to hot area. As an example, a fabrication-friendly cooling structure is devised in the case of concentrating heating following these guidelines, avoiding the computationally-expensive optimization process and the over-complicated geometries. The CFD simulations show this design can significantly reduce the thermal resistance with minor increase of pressure loss as the Reynold number from 50 to 300.