Basic Study of Concurrent Evaluation Method of Thermal Performance for Multi-Disciplinary Optimal Layout Design of Highly Packed Equipments

Layout design of highly packed equipments is governed by not only its geometric conditions but also its physical conditions, such as thermal performance, structural strength, electromagnetic shielding. Its characteristic shares some concepts with the paradigm of multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). However, applicability of MDO is still natively limited within continuous optimization problems. This paper proposes a basic idea for optimization-based layout design approaches, in which layout space is minimized and thermal performance is optimized simultaneously. In the approach, the three-dimensional layout topology is represented with sequence quintuple and optimized with simulated annealing (SA), while thermal performance is evaluated by thermal network method concurrently at the arranged stages in the double loop of the developed SA algorithm. The relationship between concurrency of evaluation and solution quality is discussed with numerical experiments.