A New Design Method, 3D Printing High-performance Liquid-cooled Radiator

At present, semiconductor devices increasingly require more compact and efficient characteristics, which has led to an increase in heat generation of equipment, so more effective cooling solutions are needed.Conventional cooling methods such as jet impact and spray cooling have complex operation problems, while microchannel radiators effectively increase the heat transfer surface area, but in experimental tests lead to higher pressure loss and pressure drop.

The University of Waterloo, Canada, the University of Alberta, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte recently published a joint research, proposing a method that combines thermal fluid topology optimization with advanced lattice design technology to design a high-performance liquid-cooled radiator suitable for 3D printing.

The inspiration for this method came from a liquid-cooled case study using a triple-cycle minimum surface (TPMS) grid, which was developed by the nTop-Puntozero design team through conformal mapping.This method focuses on copying, adjusting, and optimizing the original design, enhancing flow characteristics while maintaining effective heat dissipation, and complying with 3D printing design guidelines and constraints.This study evaluated four design variants, namely the traditional serpentine cold plate CD, the improved serpentine design S-LttcD, and two hybrid TopOpt grid radiators.During the research process, numerical simulation was also carried out to characterize the performance indicators under a series of liquid pumping powers.

The study designed four planar single-liquid radiators to verify the performance of the radiators produced by the proposed method, reflecting the key ideological routes of traditional and innovative cooling solutions.The simple serpentine design CD is inspired by conventional cold plate solutions from mainstream manufacturers.S-LttcD is an improved serpentine design with a larger main channel to allow the surface lattice of diamond types to be conformally specified by Method II.LT01 and LT02 are the results of the method proposed in this study, using a diamond-shaped TPMS grid similar to the identified flow channel.

3D printing can easily manufacture high-complexity features with extremely high resolution (100 µm), so it has gained huge applications in the aerospace, medical and automotive industries. Among them, the development of cooling technology equipment (radiators and heat exchangers) is considered to be one of the cutting-edge applications of this technology.Some non-traditional cooling systems, including herringbone fins-serpentine microchannels and more and more grid-based cold plates, have also become the subject of a lot of research. These studies can design heat sinks with degrees of freedom and driven by various algorithms through 3D printing, especially through topology optimization. Radiator.

In general, this research proposes a new method that combines heat flow topology optimization with advanced conformal mesh technology, and develops a scheme for enhancing liquid cooling radiators.The method proposed in this study significantly improves the mechanical properties compared with the traditional design. The hybrid design method can achieve good flow distribution, reduce pressure drop and thermal resistance, narrow the gap with manufacturability, solve the shortcomings of the traditional radiator design method, and improve the performance of the liquid-cooled radiator, and the method is suitable for 3D printing and has the potential for multi-disciplinary innovation.