Design of microchannel heat sink using topology optimization for high power modules cooling

With the trend of higher power density, miniaturization as well as higher operating temperature requirement, heat transfer problem has been one of the crucial issues. Microchannel heat sink shows a great potential regarding to the excellent heat dissipation capacity. This paper aims to design microchannel heat sink for high power modules cooling based on topology optimization method to obtain better cooling performance which is more compact with less mass, less frictional losses and increased thermal efficiency. To reduce the number of degrees of freedom, only the temperature magnitude and uniformity are focused. Commercial finite element software COMSOL combined with secondary development by MATLAB is used in the topology optimization analysis for 2D model of heat sink. Heat flux density 300 W/cm
²
is loaded on the whole plate sized 50*50 mm
²
uniformly. Density approach is imported to describe the volume force term of fluid and solid. Minimize pressure drop combined with maximize heat dissipation is set as the objective functional for the optimization. Finite element model based on topology optimization method is established and analyzed. It could be found that the microchannel heat sink was effective to cool down the temperature under 125 °C, and through topology optimization method the maximum temperature could be reduced to 106 °C, and the temperature difference of the whole plate is 14.4 °C, which satisfied the multi-physics and multiple optimization objectives requirements. Besides, the calculation results also showed that the weighting factor ratio of pressure drop to heat dissipation could influence the topology structure and heat dissipation ability of heat sink.