Large scale three-dimensional topology optimisation of heat sinks cooled by natural convection

Abstract

This work presents the application of density-based topology optimisation to the design of three-dimensional heat sinks cooled by natural convection. The governing equations are the steady-state incompressible Navier-Stokes equations coupled to the thermal convection-diffusion equation through the Bousinessq approximation. The fully coupled non-linear multiphysics system is solved using stabilised trilinear equal-order finite elements in a parallel framework allowing for the optimisation of large scale problems with order of 40-330 million state degrees of freedom. The flow is assumed to be laminar and several optimised designs are presented for Grashof numbers between $10^3$ and $10^6$. Interestingly, it is observed that the number of branches in the optimised design increases with increasing Grashof numbers, which is opposite to two-dimensional optimised designs.

Submitted (18th of August 2015)

References in corpus (3)

• Topology optimisation for natural convection problems
• Robust topology optimisation of microstructural details without length scale separation - using a spectral coarse basis preconditioner
• Scaling behavior of optimally structured catalytic microfluidic reactors

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