Multi-disciplinary optimization of gyroid topologies for a cold plate heat exchanger design

The strive to reduce the environmental impact of aviation has led to electrification and increasing demand for powerful on-board power electronic systems. These high-performance electrical components are bound to produce significant amounts of low-quality heat waste that, if not dissipated properly, will lead to malfunctioning and even permanent damage. For this reason, high performance heat exchangers represent a key enabler for future advances in aircraft systems electrification and are vital to meet net zero goals and reduce the aviation’s carbon footprint. For a given volume of the exchanger, the heat flow rate can be increased by adopting more sophisticated fluid domains. However, excessive geometrical complexity will lead to an increase in pressure losses, often resulting in inhomogeneous temperature distributions. In this paper, a novel optimization procedure is employed to maximize the efficiency of a high-performance heat exchanger, while minimizing overall pressure loss and temperature gradients. The optimization is performed with full-3D high-fidelity computational flow simulations. The geometry of the fluid domain is constituted by triply periodic minimal surfaces, with a parametrization based on thickness and aspect ratios, done by using the nTopology suite. To assess the performance gain, the topology-optimized design is compared against the datum case and a conventional serpentine design.