Multi-objective topology optimization and numerical investigation of heat sinks based on triply periodic minimal surface lattices

In thermal management applications, such as heat sinks (HSs) for electronic devices, cellular materials have extensively been employed. In recent years, there has been a growing attention towards employing topology optimization for enhancing hydraulic and heat transfer performance of HSs by optimizing their topology. The utilization of triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) based structures presents distinctive prospects for customizing the design and performance of HSs. However, their potential remains unexplored in the context of customizing additively manufactured porous optimized HSs. Consequently, there is a need for research aimed at examining their coupled hydraulic and thermal performance. Density mapping approaches are used to build a variable density TPMS-based HSs from the output of topology optimization by applying the TPMS level-set equations that relate relative density and the level-set constant. In this work, a relative density mapping methodology is applied to thermo-fluid optimization problem to design a TPMS-based convective cooling system. An in-house MATLAB code was developed to perform a multi-objective topology optimization. After that, uniform and variable density (mapped from topology optimization results) TPMS-based HSs are analyzed using Star-CCM+ CFD software to investigate their hydraulic and heat transfer performance. An experimental setup was established, and the numerical results were validated using uniform TPMS-based heat sinks. Results showed that incorporating TPMS with topology optimization has a great potential in thermal management applications as pressure drop across the heat sink was reduced while maintaining the performance.