ESTONIAN ACADEMY
PUBLISHERS
eesti teaduste
akadeemia kirjastus
PUBLISHED
SINCE 1952
 
Proceeding cover
proceedings
of the estonian academy of sciences
ISSN 1736-7530 (Electronic)
ISSN 1736-6046 (Print)

Research article
Additive manufacturing-aware topology optimization of cooling channels using a reduced-order cold plate model for electric machine water jackets; pp. 346–352
PDF | https://doi.org/10.3176/proc.2026.4.08

Authors
Yang Zhang ORCID Icon, Martin Sarap ORCID Icon, Toomas Vaimann ORCID Icon, Ants Kallaste ORCID Icon
Abstract

Integrated liquid cooling jackets are widely used in the thermal management of high-power-density motors, but traditional designs rely on parametric channel layouts, failing to fully utilize the geometric degrees of freedom offered by additive manufacturing (AM). This paper proposes an AM-aware topology optimization framework based on a reduced-order cold plate model. A two-dimensional case study systematically investigates the effects of manufacturability-oriented regularization on channel topology and thermo-hydraulic performance. Results show that stronger regularization substantially reduces interface complexity and fluid area fraction, while generally increasing hydraulic resistance and degrading thermal performance. A sharp-interface reanalysis further demonstrates good agreement in the global thermal response, while revealing the sensitivity of the local peak temperature and hydraulic conductance to the density-based representation.

References

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2. Ye, Z.-N., Luo, W.-D., Zhang, W.-M. and Feng, Z.-X. Simulative analysis of traction motor cooling system based on CFD. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Electric Information and Control Engineering, Wuhan, China, 15–17 April 2011. IEEE, 2011, 746–749. 
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3. Liu, Z., Zhao, H., Qiu, Y., Zeng, H. and Dong, X. Numerical analysis of topology-optimized cold plates for thermal manage­ment of battery packs. Applied Thermal Engineering, 2024, 238, 121983. 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2023.121983  

4. Guest, J. K., Prévost, J. H. and Belytschko, T. Achieving minimum length scale in topology optimization using nodal design variables and projection functions. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 2004, 61(2), 238–254. 
https://doi.org/10.1002/nme.1064

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