203 research outputs found
Large scale three-dimensional topology optimisation of heat sinks cooled by natural convection
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 and .
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.Comment: Submitted (18th of August 2015
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