OPTIMAL HEAT SINK DESIGN USING MATHEMATICAL OPTIMIZATION

摘要

Heat sink designers have to balance a number of conflicting parameters to maximize the performance of heat sinks. This must be achieved within the given constraints of size of the heat sink, maximum temperature, the mass or material cost of the heat sink as well as the pressure drop across the heat sink in the case of forced convection. This multi-parameter problem lends itself naturally to optimization techniques. Traditionally, experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics techniques have been used on a trial-and-error basis. This leads to long design cycles and non-optimal solutions. It is however desirable to find the optimum heat sink that is a trade-off between heat sink mass and thermal resistance. The paper illustrates how mathematical optimization techniques combined with a semi-empirical thermal simulation program can be used to construct a trade-off curve (Pareto-optimal set) between the heat sink mass and thermal resistance for a given heat sink. The thermal simulation uses the QFin 2.1 code, while the optimization is carried out with the DYNAMIC-Q method. This trade-off curve can be used by the engineer to decide on the optimal heat sink design that is the best compromise between heat sink mass and thermal resistance for his application.