Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.
This paper presents a three-dimensional geometric
optimisation of cooling channels in forced convection of
vascularised material with the localised self-cooling property
subject to heat flux. Square configuration was studied for
family of porosities. The configuration geometry was optimised
in such a way that the peak temperature was minimised at every
point in the solid body. The optimisation was subject to the
constraint of fixed global volume of solid material, but the
elemental volume was allowed to morph. The solid material
was subject to heat flux on one side and the cooling fluid was
forced through the channels in opposite direction of the heated
side of the solid body by the specified pressure difference
across the transverse channels in the body. The structure had
three degrees of freedom as design variables: elemental
volume, channel hydraulic diameter and channel-to-channel
spacing. A gradient-based optimisation algorithm was used to
determine the optimal geometry that gave the lowest thermal
resistance. This optimiser adequately handled the numerical
objective function obtained from CFD simulations. The
numerical results obtained show that as pressure difference
increases, the minimised peak temperature decreases. The
results also show the behaviour of the applied pressure
difference on the optimised geometry. The use of optimiser
made the numerical results to be more robust with respect to the
optima internal configurations of the flow systems and
dimensionless pressure difference.
