Topology optimization of thermal fluid flows with an adjoint Lattice Boltzmann Method

This paper presents an adjoint Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) coupled with the Level-Set Method (LSM) for topology optimization of thermal fluid flows. The adjoint-state formulation implies discrete velocity directions in order to take into account the LBM boundary conditions. These boundary conditions are introduced at the beginning of the adjoint-state method as the LBM residuals, so that the adjoint-state boundary conditions can appear directly during the adjoint-state equation formulation. The proposed method is tested with 3 numerical examples concerning thermal fluid flows, but with different objectives: minimization of the mean temperature in the domain, maximization of the heat evacuated by the fluid, and maximization of the heat exchange with heated solid parts. This latter example, treated in several articles, is used to validate our method. In these optimization problems, a limitation of the maximal pressure drop and of the porosity (number of fluid elements) is also applied. The obtained results demonstrate that the method is robust and effective for solving topology optimization of thermal fluid flows.