Heat Transfer Enhancement Across a Pair of Confined Cylinders Using Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

The dissipation of the heat generated by electronic devices is the key issue in design and development of such products. The trend, especially in the computer industries, has been reducing the size and increasing the computing power of the electronic elements. Studies have indicated that the thermal performance of a micro-channel depends on its geometric parameters and flow conditions. Many techniques have been developed to enhance the performance of confined elliptical cylinders while minimizing the momentum loss. In this paper, a new robust optimization technique is presented. This new technique is an improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm in which diversity is actively preserved by avoiding overcrowded clusters of particles and encouraging broader exploration. Adaptively varying “territories” are formed around promising individuals to prevent many of the lesser individuals from premature clustering and encouraged them to explore new neighborhoods based on a hybrid self-social metric. Also, a new social interaction scheme is introduced which guided particles towards the weighted average of their “elite” neighbors’ best found positions instead of their own personal bests. The case study in this paper is a two dimensional incompressible flow of non-Newtonian power-law fluid over a pair of elliptical tandem cylinders confined in a channel. A new curve parameterization named Class-Shape-Refinement-Transformation method is used to modify the shape of the confined cylinders, and its control points are adopted as the design variables. Furthermore, final solutions obtained from the Territorial Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm reveal an evident improvement over the test case cylinder across all objective functions presented.