Technical Papers and Presentations

For this work the multi-objective design environment modeFRONTIER was integrated with COMSOL, bringing the advantages of multi-objective optimization to multiphysics simulations. Practically any commercial analysis tool (such as COMSOL) or in-house code can be integrated within modeFRONTIER’s framework. In the case of the direct approach, modeFRONTIER determines the configurations to be analyzed, and automatically launches COMSOL, monitoring the results in order to assess the performance relative to the objectives. One application involves the optimization of a strip-fin microchannel heat sink, where the target was to simultaneously minimize both the temperature variation on the chip and the cooling pump power, while constraining the maximum temperature on the microchip. Both geometric and process variables were employed; these included a mix of continuous and discrete, dimensional and non-dimensional. In all cases modeFRONTIER’s extensive post-processing toolkit, consisting of both statistical and graphical methods, was used to gain a full understanding of the results obtained.