Design, Fabrication and Modeling of Optimized TPMS-based Structures for Heat Sink Applications

Abstract

Cellular materials have been widely used in thermal management applications such as heat sinks (HSs) for electronic devices. The topology optimization technique has recently gained interest in designing the topology of HSs with optimized thermal performance. Triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) based structures offer unique opportunities for tailoring the design and performance of HSs, but their potential has not been explored in customizing additively manufactured porous optimized HSs. Therefore, research is needed to analyze their structural, hydraulic and thermal performance. Density mapping approaches are used to construct a variable density TPMS-based structure from topology optimization output through relationship between relative density and level-set constant of TPMS equation. The main contribution of this project is to develop a generic homogenization framework, which can be applied to different types of problems, to obtain variable density TPMS-based heat sink structures. The density mapping approaches were found useful to design equivalent TPMS-based HS structures with improved performance as compared to uniform TPMS HS structures. In this work, the proposed methodology is applied to three types of topology optimization problems which are pure conduction problem, multi-objective optimization of heat sinks including self-weight and thermo-fluid optimization of convective cooling systems. An in-house MATLAB code was developed to perform topology optimization. After that, variable density TPMS-based structure mapped from topology optimization results is analyzed by a commercial software such as COMSOL, Abaqus and Star CCM+ to investigate their performance. Performance of mapped TPMS-based structures is compared with un-mapped structures for studies 1 and 2. In study 3, performance of mapped TPMS-based structures is compared with uniform density TPMS-based structures. In addition, an experimental test setup was built to validate numerical results obtained from hydraulic and thermohydraulic studies on uniform and mapped TPMS-based heat sink structures. Results showed that incorporating TPMS with topology optimization has great potential in thermal management applications.

Date of Award	Dec 2022
Original language	American English
Supervisor	KAMRAN KHAN KHAN (Supervisor)