Technical Papers and Presentations

Resistive heating elements and conductive cooling networks are everywhere, from heated aircraft wings and spacecraft thermal panels, to electric vehicle battery films, surgical warming blankets, semiconductor wafer chucks, microfluidic PCR chips, refrigeration coils, cold plates for high-power electronics, and de-icing systems for radomes, solar panels, and bridge decks. Despite the breadth of these applications, they share a common challenge: achieving uniform temperature across a complex two-dimensional surface while minimizing hotspots, eliminating cold zones, and maximizing the use of available area. The conductive trace or fluid line that snakes across the surface is the central design variable governing thermal behavior. Yet conventional designs frequently rely on manual or templated patterns that leave surface area underutilized and produce non-uniform thermal distributions. To address this gap, Triton Systems’ TRACE Simulation division designed and implemented a custom subroutine as a plug-in extension to COMSOL Multiphysics, written against COMSOL's native Java API. COMSOL 6.3 introduced an interactive Java Shell window, streamlining this integration process. The plug-in accepts arbitrary input polygons of any shape or size, along with user-defined parameters including trace thickness, edge-to-edge buffer zones, channel pitch, source and sink node placement, and exclusion regions. The initial deposition strategy implements a boustrophedon concentric spiral, a pattern that efficiently fills the available surface area while guaranteeing non-intersecting geometry and deliberately staggering segments to disrupt the formation of cold zones. Once generated, the optimized path is automatically passed back into COMSOL, populating a parametric geometry and launching a coupled multiphysics study, combining the AC/DC and Heat Transfer modules for resistive heating cases or Heat Transfer with CFD for fluid-based cooling cases, to evaluate temperature uniformity, peak and minimum temperatures, and overall thermal distribution. In a recent demonstration, the plug-in was used to refine etch patterns for hexagonal, circular, rectangular, and square heating elements, achieving etch length improvements of approximately 15% over baseline commercial designs. This plug-in can be redirected toward EV battery heating and cooling films, semiconductor process equipment, medical warming and cryotherapy devices, wearable thermal regulation, microfluidic thermal cycling, spacecraft thermal control, solar de-icing, smart building radiant panels, data center cold plates, and refrigeration line layout. By packaging algorithmic path optimization and COMSOL-based multiphysics validation into a single automated workflow, the plug-in reduces material usage, minimizes hot- and cold-spot risk, accelerates time-to-prototype, and supports the design of next-generation thermal management solutions across virtually every market that depends on precise surface-level heating or cooling.