Advanced Optimal Design Strategies for Divortor Shape Design and Compact Electronics Cooling

In many engineering applications, improved designs are continuously strived for. Think for example of design of airplane wings, which has shown the potential to strongly lower the fuel consumed during flights. Yet, because of the high costs of fabricating and testing different configurations, the amount of designs that can be explored with trial-and-error is very limited. Therefore, improved designs are at least partially driven by computer simulations and optimization techniques in such applications. In this project, design applications are considered for which accurate simulation-based design was thus far barely possible, because of the time-consuming simulations and the lack of sufficient computing power. The first application is the improved design of nuclear fusion reactor components, which is considered a crucial step towards a new sustainable resource of energy. The second is the three-dimensional design of efficient heat sinks, important amongst others to decrease the size of today's electronics devices. Very fast optimization methods will now be developed to make accurate and reliable optimized shape and topology designs available in these applications. Special attention is hereby paid to developing methods that are able to guarantee the practical manufacturability of the obtained designs. Additionally, strategies will be developed to avoid the optimal design algorithm from stopping in the first 'local optimum' it finds. As such, still better designs can be found.