Surface Shape Design in Different Convection Heat Transfer Problems Via a Novel Coupled Algorithm

Abstract

In this study, a new coupled surface shape design (SSD) methodology named direct design method is presented for the solution of problems containing different types of convection heat transfer in which a specific distribution of either heat flux or temperature is given instead of the shape of a boundary. In the proposed method, the governing equation, without using any mathematical transformation for the physical domains, is manipulated so that the grid generation, solving fluid flow, and heat transfer as well as shape updating can all be carried out simultaneously. Five different inverse shape design problems containing different types of convection heat transfer are solved by the proposed method. All the problems are also solved using the ball-spine algorithm (BSA), which is a recently developed de-coupled algorithm, for the sake of comparison. In all problems, the effects of using different under-relaxation parameters are investigated and the capability of both approaches is compared with each other. The results show that the proposed coupled method can solve the problems better than the BSA in the sense that the direct design method converges sooner than the BSA when the same under-relaxation parameter is used for both methods. Also, it is shown that the computational cost of solving a SSD problem using the direct design method is slightly greater than solving an analysis problem.