ADDITIVE DESIGN OF HEAT SINKS

摘要

Techniques for employing an additive design process to design heat sinks are disclosed. A heat sink “grows” through an iteration process. During each iteration step, an object is added to a location determined based on simulation. The criterion for the determination may be being a location having a highest fluid apparent surface temperature value or being a location having a highest bottleneck heat transfer characteristic value. The thermal performance of the newly derived structure is simulated. If a predetermined condition is met, the object is kept. Otherwise, the object is removed and the location is marked so that the same addition may not occur subsequently. The iteration process may be repeated.

主权项

1. A method, executed by at least one processor of a computer, comprising:
A: determining a location on a heat sink base based on a simulation of a structure in a cooling environment and a predetermined criterion, the structure comprising the heat sink base and a heat source; B: adding an object to the location to form a new structure; C: simulating the new structure to determine thermal performance of the new structure; and D: repeating operations B and C until a predetermined condition regarding design space is met, wherein the repeating comprises:
if the thermal performance of the new structure meets a predetermined condition regarding thermal performance, replacing the location with a new location determined for the new structure based on the simulating and the predetermined criterion for operation B; andif the thermal performance of the new structure does not meet the predetermined condition regarding thermal performance, removing the added object, designating the location as a location not eligible for the adding, and replacing the location with a new location for the structure selected from locations eligible for the adding based on the predetermined criterion for operation B.