Purpose

The purpose of the study is to optimise the cross-sectional shape of passively cooled horizontally mounted pin-fin heat sink for higher cooling performance and lower material usage.

Design/methodology/approach

Multi-objective shape optimisation technique is used to design the heat sink fins. Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is combined with a geometric module to develop the shape optimiser. High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to evaluate the design objectives. Separate optimisations are carried out to design the shape of bottom row fins and middle row fins of a pin-fin heat sink. Finally, a computational validation was conducted by generating a three-dimensional pin-fin heat sink using optimised fin cross sections and comparing its performance against the circular pin-fin heat sink with the same inter-fin spacing value.

Findings

Heat sink with optimised fin cross sections has 1.6% higher cooling effectiveness than circular pin-fin heat sink of same material volume, and has 10.3% higher cooling effectiveness than the pin-fin heat sink of same characteristics fin dimension. The special geometric features of optimised fins that resulted in superior performance are highlighted. Further, Pareto-optimal fronts for this multi-objective optimisation problem are obtained for different fin design scenarios.

Originality/value

For the first time, passively cooled heat sink’s cross-sectional shapes are optimised for different spatial arrangements, using NSGA-II-based shape optimiser, which makes use of CFD solver to evaluate the design objectives. The optimised, high-performance shapes will find direct application to cool power electronic equipment.

中文翻译：

---

基于多目标 NSGA-II 的被动冷却散热器横截面形状优化

目的

该研究的目的是优化被动冷却水平安装的针翅式散热器的横截面形状，以获得更高的冷却性能和更低的材料使用量。

设计/方法/方法

采用多目标形状优化技术设计散热片。非支配排序遗传算法（NSGA-II）结合几何模块开发形状优化器。高保真计算流体动力学 (CFD) 用于评估设计目标。分别进行优化以设计针翅式散热器的底排翅片和中排翅片的形状。最后，通过使用优化的翅片横截面生成三维针翅片散热器并将其性能与具有相同翅片间距值的圆形针翅片散热器进行比较来进行计算验证。

发现

优化翅片截面的散热片，其散热效率比同等材料体积的圆形针翅式散热片高1.6%，比相同特征翅片尺寸的针翅式散热片散热效率高10.3%。突出显示了优化翅片的特殊几何特征，从而实现了卓越的性能。此外，针对不同的鳍设计方案，获得了该多目标优化问题的帕累托最优前沿。

原创性/价值

被动冷却散热器的横截面形状首次针对不同的空间布置进行优化，使用基于 NSGA-II 的形状优化器，利用 CFD 求解器来评估设计目标。优化的高性能形状将直接应用于冷却电力电子设备。