Intelligent Design Method for Thermal Conductivity Topology Based on a Deep Generative Network

Abstract Heat dissipation performance is critical to the design of high-end equipment, such as integrated chips and high-precision machine tools. Owing to the advantages of artificial intelligence in solving complex tasks involving a large number of variables, researchers have exploited deep learning to expedite the optimization of material properties, such as the heat dissipation of solid isotropic materials with penalization (SIMP). However, because the approach is limited by discrete datasets and labeled training forms, ensuring the continuous adaptation of the condition domain and maintaining the stability of the design structure remain major challenges in the current intelligent design methodology for thermally conductive structures. In this study, we propose an innovative intelligent design framework integrating Conditional Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (CDCGAN) with SIMP, capable of creating topology structures that meet prescribed thermal conduction performance. This proposed design strategy significantly reduces the computational time required to solve symmetric and random heat sink problems compared with existing design approaches and is approximately 98% faster than standard SIMP methods and 55.5% faster than conventional deep-learning-based methods. In addition, we benchmarked the design performance of the proposed framework against theoretical structural designs via experimental measurements. We observed a 50.1% reduction in the average temperature and a 28.2% reduction in the highest temperature in our designed topology compared with those theoretical structure designs.