TY - JOUR
T1 - Gradient-based design of actively-cooled microvascular composite panels
AU - Tan, Marcus Hwai Yik
AU - Najafi, Ahmad R.
AU - Pety, Stephen J.
AU - White, Scott R.
AU - Geubelle, Philippe H.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work has been supported by the DEMS Program of the NSF Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (Award No. 1436720); the Air Force Office of Scientific Research National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (32 CFR 168a); the Center for Electrical Energy Storage funded by DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences (Grant No. 615 DOE ANL 9F-31921). The authors wish to thank Dr. Masoud Safdari for useful discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2016/12/1
Y1 - 2016/12/1
N2 - Recent advances in manufacturing based on sacrificial fiber or template techniques have allowed complex networks of microchannels to be embedded in microvascular composites. In the thermal application of interest, a novel battery packaging scheme for electric vehicles is considered where each battery is surrounded by microvascular composite panels for temperature regulation and structural protection. We use simplified thermal and hydraulics models validated against more complex 3D FLUENT simulations and experiments to obtain the surface temperature distribution of the panel and the pressure drops across the microchannels. We further eliminate the cost and complexity associated with mesh generation by applying the interface-enriched generalized finite element method (IGFEM), which allows a non-conforming mesh to capture the discontinuous temperature gradient across the microchannels. The IGFEM thermal solver is then combined with a gradient-based shape optimization scheme to obtain optimal designs of a set of branched microchannel networks. The design parameters are the channel control points, which define the shape of the network. We use the p-mean as a differentiable objective function in place of the maximum temperature. To obtain accurate gradients with respect to the design parameters efficiently, we perform a sensitivity analysis based on a recently developed adjoint method for IGFEM. Starting from many distinct configurations, we obtain the optimal designs for a wide range of network topologies. We also investigate the effect of the coolant flow rate on the optimal design.
AB - Recent advances in manufacturing based on sacrificial fiber or template techniques have allowed complex networks of microchannels to be embedded in microvascular composites. In the thermal application of interest, a novel battery packaging scheme for electric vehicles is considered where each battery is surrounded by microvascular composite panels for temperature regulation and structural protection. We use simplified thermal and hydraulics models validated against more complex 3D FLUENT simulations and experiments to obtain the surface temperature distribution of the panel and the pressure drops across the microchannels. We further eliminate the cost and complexity associated with mesh generation by applying the interface-enriched generalized finite element method (IGFEM), which allows a non-conforming mesh to capture the discontinuous temperature gradient across the microchannels. The IGFEM thermal solver is then combined with a gradient-based shape optimization scheme to obtain optimal designs of a set of branched microchannel networks. The design parameters are the channel control points, which define the shape of the network. We use the p-mean as a differentiable objective function in place of the maximum temperature. To obtain accurate gradients with respect to the design parameters efficiently, we perform a sensitivity analysis based on a recently developed adjoint method for IGFEM. Starting from many distinct configurations, we obtain the optimal designs for a wide range of network topologies. We also investigate the effect of the coolant flow rate on the optimal design.
KW - Battery cooling
KW - Interface-enriched generalized finite element method
KW - Microchannel
KW - Microvascular composite
KW - Optimization
KW - Simplified thermal model
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2016.07.092
DO - 10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2016.07.092
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84981322924
SN - 0017-9310
VL - 103
SP - 594
EP - 606
JO - International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer
JF - International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer
ER -