Topology Optimization Design Of Meta-Material Heat Spreader

The increasing power density in electronics calls for novel approaches to manipulate heat flow. Thermal meta-materials, which do not exist naturally but can be designed rationally, have been proved to manipulate heat flow as will recently. The heat flow manipulators constructed by the thermal meta-materials, such as thermal cloak, thermal concentrator and thermal rotator have exhibited the potentials to be applied in novel heat flow guiding in electronics packaging. This work aims to design heat spreader with thermal meta-materials to protect critical device component from heat source and dissipate heat flow in a deterministic way. Commercial finite element software COMSOL Multiphysics has been used in solving topology optimization of heat transfer problem. The physical model has been set as a hot spot heat source with a power density of 1 × 10 ¹¹ W/m ³ placed in the upper part of a 0.1mm height silicon plate. The size of the plate is 0.6*1 mm ² and the radius of the hot spot is 0.1mm. A critical square component with a size of 0.2*0.2 mm ² is placed in the lower part of the plate. A middle section with a size of 0.2*0.1 mm ² at bottom side of the plate is set to room temperature T0=293.15K to represent that it is connected to a heat sink. Two sections with the size of 0.1 *0.1 mm ² at upper side of the plate are also set to room temperature T0 to represent two electrodes connecting to heat sink. The rest edges of the plate are set as convective heat flux to the environment with a heat transfer coefficient h=10 W/(m ² . K). The simulation results have shown that the average temperature of the critical component is 5.92K lower after the optimization. However, the heat dissipation in the heat source region has been sacrificed under the current the optimization objective. This work has offered an interesting and alternative approach for design heat management devices.