The present work explores the formal evolutionary development of complex thermal physical systems using a bio-inspired evolutionary method. The bio-inspired method consists of Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) with its turtle interpretation for the modeling of the complex dendritic structures, the finite element method for the analysis of the structure and an evolutionary algorithm to evolve the topology of the dendritic structure. With this method, we investigate the optimal topology of a highly conductive dendritic structure for draining excessive thermal energy from a fixed area subject to uniform heat generation. The results show that the evolutionary approach can yield complex, dendritic topologies that are highly performing and robust. Moreover, our results demonstrate that a better performance in heat removal implies an increased complexity of the draining system; and that there is an optimal level of complexity beyond which the performance of the system is not substantially improved. Finally, we discuss the robustness of hierarchical, dendritic complex topologies for heat transfer systems.
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