A multi region adjoint-based solver for topology optimization in conjugate heat transfer problems

The Cut-Cell Method for the Conjugate Heat Transfer Topology Optimization of Turbulent Flows Using the “Think Discrete–Do Continuous” Adjoint

“…TopO formulations for fluid mechanics include phase-field approaches [2], level set methods [3][4][5][6], porosity/density-based methods [7,8], etc., with applications to a wide range of problems, including Stokes flows [7], laminar [8] and turbulent flows [9][10][11], unsteady flows [12,13], reactive flows [14], natural convection problems [15,16], etc. The use of TopO for fluid problems with CHT first appeared in [17,18] and still remains an active area of research [19][20][21][22], including also the design of bi-fluid heat exchangers [23][24][25]. An overview of the stateof-the-art TopO methods for fluid flow problems, including heat transfer, was recently published [26].…”

“…The flow solver utilizes also adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to better resolve the flow and thermal boundary layers around the FSI. AMR has been used recently to enhance the accuracy of TopO using the density [21] and the level-set approach [22], but not in the context of TopO with immersed boundary methods, as in this work. The imposition of exact boundary conditions and the AMR affect not only the accuracy of the flow solver but also the optimized geometries designed by it; see Section 4.…”