Abstract

Additive manufacturing has made it possible to push the limits of designs beyond the skills and imagination of traditional design engineers. Topology optimization closes the gap between the possibilities and the automation in obtaining those organic optimized shapes. A key class of engineering problems, fluid and thermal applications, are benefiting from the advances on those two design and manufacturing technologies. In this paper, a brake cooling duct is optimized in terms of increasing the heat transfer delivered to the front brake rotor. Topology optimization is automatically designing a new brake duct within the constraint space available behind the front bumper. The heat transfer coefficient on the rotor is used as a cost function to be maximized while we enforce a volume constraint and a minimum pressure drop through the brake duct. At the end of the optimization loop the newly designed duct is exported and reintroduced in the car geometry in order to assess the actual gain. A further adjoint shape optimization step can push the design to even further performance gains. The topology optimization method used here is a feature of Simcenter STAR-CCM+. It is based on a level set approach which results in designs with less kinks and folds. This can reduce the clean-up and CAD reproduction time significantly and ultimately reducing the cost of production. The level set approach further improves the robustness of the optimization solutions allowing users to run with semi-converged adjoint and flow solutions for the intermediate step. The topology optimization method features an integrated constrained optimization method that allows you to solve engineering problems with competing attributes by defining one objective and multiple flow and thermal constraints as well as volume constraint. Topology optimization reducing the design and computational effort needed to determine an optimized shape, while additive manufacturing makes it possible to produce the optimized duct design.