Thermal sturcutre design of air-cooled heat sinks for power electronic equipments by constrained population extremal optimization

The optimal thermal design issue of a forced aircooled heat sink to obtain satisfied performance indices such as thermal resistance, pressure drop, geometry, total weight and cost is great of practical value for the stable and safe operations of a power electronic equipment. This paper formulates this issue firstly as a typical constrained optimization problem by considering the entropy generation rate as the objective function subjecting to some engineering constraints, and then presents a novel thermal design method for a air-cooled heat sink by combining the basic idea of entropy generation minimization (EGM) and an effective constrained evolutionary algorithm called constrained population extremal optimization (CPEO). The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing the performance of different evolutionary algorithms based design methods for a typical forced air-cooled heat sink in terms of statistical and the best performance indices such as entropy generation rate, thermal resistance, pressure drop, geometry and total weight.