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A comparison of manufacturing constraints in 3D topologically optimized heat sinks for forced air cooling

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Abstract

In this paper, the manufacturability of 3D topologically optimized (TO) heat sinks for forced-air cooling is studied for both additive manufacturing and subtractive numerical control machining. To mitigate the manufacturing difficulties which are frequently encountered when fabricating TO designs, we adopt two approaches. First, a constraint on the projected undercut perimeter is added to the standard optimization formulation to limit the number and severity of costly non-self supporting features in additive manufacturing. Second, a multi-axis machining (MAM) constraint is adopted to serve as the basis for enforcing manufacturability in a TO design for an alternative, highly-popular manufacturing modality. Locally refined nonuniform unstructured meshing and unit-cell assembly techniques for increasing the mesh and design resolution were pursued during optimization. Post-analyses were conducted in OpenFOAM for all TO and corresponding parallel-fin designs. Simulation results showed that topologically optimized heat sinks offer a 35–40% advantage in temperature performance over conventional parallel fins. A limited or non-existent compromising of thermal-hydraulic performance was necessary to enforce manufacturability. Finally, to prove the practical efficacy of the overhang angle control constraint, the AM-constrained heat sinks designs were fabricated through direct metal laser sintering in both aluminum and stainless steel.

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Acknowledgements

The authors want to acknowledge the support from the ONR grant N00014-18-1-2685 managed by Dr. Mark Spector and Sony Faculty Innovation award. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562. This work used XSEDE TACC Dell/Intel Knights Landing, SkylakeSystem (Stampede2) at the service-provider through allocation TG-DDM190003. J. Gasick wants to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1747503.

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  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

    Tianye Wang, Joshua Gasick, Sicheng Sun & Xiaoping Qian

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  1. Tianye Wang
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Correspondence to Xiaoping Qian.

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Wang, T., Gasick, J., Sun, S. et al. A comparison of manufacturing constraints in 3D topologically optimized heat sinks for forced air cooling. Engineering with Computers 39, 1711–1733 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-023-01786-y

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