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Multiscale concurrent topology optimization of structures and microscopic multi-phase materials for thermal conductivity

Daicong Da (State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, China and Joint Center for Intelligent New Energy Vehicle, Shanghai, China)
Xiangyang Cui (State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, China and Joint Center for Intelligent New Energy Vehicle, Shanghai, China)
Kai Long (State Key Laboratory for Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China)
Yong Cai (State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, China and Joint Center for Intelligent New Energy Vehicle, Shanghai, China)
Guangyao Li (State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, China and Joint Center for Intelligent New Energy Vehicle, Shanghai, China)

Engineering Computations

ISSN: 0264-4401

Article publication date: 14 December 2018

Issue publication date: 8 February 2019

690

Abstract

Purpose

The optimal material microstructures in pure material design are no longer efficient or optimal when accounting macroscopic structure performance with specific boundary conditions. Therefore, it is important to provide a novel multiscale topology optimization framework to tailor the topology of structure and the material to achieve specific applications. In comparison with porous materials, composites consisting of two or more phase materials are more attractive and advantageous from the perspective of engineering application. This paper aims to provide a novel concurrent topological design of structures and microscopic materials for thermal conductivity involving multi-material topology optimization (material distribution) at the lower scale.

Design/methodology/approach

In this work, the effective thermal conductivity properties of microscopic three or more phase materials are obtained via homogenization theory, which serves as a bridge of the macrostructure and the periodic material microstructures. The optimization problem, including the topological design of macrostructures and inverse homogenization of microscopic materials, are solved by bi-directional evolutionary structure optimization method.

Findings

As a result, the presented framework shows high stability during the optimization process and requires little iterations for convergence. A number of interesting and valid macrostructures and material microstructures are obtained in terms of optimal thermal conductive path, which verify the effectiveness of the proposed mutliscale topology optimization method. Numerical examples adequately consider effects of initial guesses of the representative unit cell and of the volume constraints of adopted base materials at the microscopic scale on the final design. The resultant structures at both the scales with clear and distinctive boundary between different phases, making the manufacturing straightforward.

Originality/value

This paper presents a novel multiscale concurrent topology optimization method for structures and the underlying multi-phase materials for thermal conductivity. The authors have carried out the concurrent multi-phase topology optimization for both 2D and 3D cases, which makes this work distinguished from existing references. In addition, some interesting and efficient multi-phase material microstructures and macrostructures have been obtained in terms of optimal thermal conductive path.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by State Key Program of National Natural Science of China (61232014), National Science Foundation of China (11472101) and Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (2013M531780). K. Long thanks the financial support of National Natural Science Foundation of Beijing (No. 2182067) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2017MS077, 2018ZD09). The authors are especially grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their proposals that helped to improve the quality of the paper.

Citation

Da, D., Cui, X., Long, K., Cai, Y. and Li, G. (2019), "Multiscale concurrent topology optimization of structures and microscopic multi-phase materials for thermal conductivity", Engineering Computations, Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 126-146. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-01-2018-0007

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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