Thermal reliability-based design optimization using Kriging model of PCM based pin fin heat sink

This paper deals with the thermal reliability optimization of a pin fin heat sink (HS) filled with phase change material (PCM) in order to study the heat transfer performance for cooling of electronic devices. Aluminium is taken to carry out the pin fin heat sink with a constant volume fraction of 9% by choosing 72 pin fins. Paraffin wax is used as PCM inside the heat sink to retain the heat produced by the electronic device. A reliability-based design optimization (REDO) is addressed to determine the optimum thermal configuration of the pin fin heat sink that satisfies the desired reliability. The presented methodology is summarized by the combination of the 3D finite element simulation (FES), the Kriging substitution model and the optimization procedure. The surrogate model is built and validated using two metrics such as error predictions and cross validation (CV). A comparison of the number of training points shows that the Kriging predictor with 100 Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) points provides a better approximation of the original model. Thermal optimization results show that the time taken by the latent heating phase of the optimal design is higher than that obtained by the baseline model. With the reliability optimization, the maximum temperature of the optimal design was reduced by 30%. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.