Heat transfer performance and internal pressure bearing capacity of L-PBF TA15 TPMS heat sinks

The application of high-power heat sinks has greatly enhanced the efficiency of chips, batteries and aero-engines by heat dissipation. In order to improve the heat dissipation efficiency of heat sinks, a novel TPMS heat sink structure was designed considering heat transfer and internal pressure-bearing performance, which has larger heat transfer contact area. The geometric parameters of TPMS structures were optimized by genetic algorithm and AutoML methods. The novel TPMS structure and pipe structure, whose in-plane size was 300 mm× 300 mm, were fabricated by laser powder bed fusion( L -PBF) using TA15 titanium alloy. The fabrication constraints were considered in the design method, including self-supporting, minimum feature size and flow channel integrity. X-ray computed tomography scanning was used to quantify the manufactured deviations of structures by comparing the as-designed and as-printed structures. Simulations used sCO₂, whereas room-temperature air experiment was adopted for comparative heat-transfer experiments. Under the same flow rate, the heat-transfer efficiency of the novel TPMS heat sink increased by 50%. Because the inlet flow area of the I-WP specimen was 7.6 times that of the straight-tube specimen, the system-level pressure drop decreased by 80%. The structures remained intact under 20 MPa internal hydrostatic pressure. This novel design method offers valuable guidance for compact and heat transfer performance improvement of cooling channel structures.