Topology optimization of thermal–fluid problem using the MMC-based approach

The moving morphable components (MMC)-based approach has advantages in describing geometry explicitly, feature size controlling, etc., and it has been successfully used for the topology design of bearing structures. In this work, the MMC-based approach is extended to thermal-fluid design which is formulated as a heat transfer maximization and fluid power dissipation minimization problem controlled by Navier–Stokes (N–S) and energy balance equations. Aiming at describing the geometry of bend pipes which usually have a larger curvature than the bearing structures, a cubic order component with elliptic joints is proposed. In order to limit the minimum width of pipes according to the manufacturing capacity, a feature size control technique is developed. The algorithm is investigated on a two-dimensional numerical model by comparing with density-based method and MMC approach with quadratic components. In our tests, besides the advantage of feather size controlling, the developed MMC also achieves lower objective values than the other two methods.