A Method for Geometry Optimization in a Simple Model of Two-Dimensional Heat Transfer

This investigation is motivated by the problem of optimal design of cooling elements in modern battery systems. We consider a simple model of two-dimensional steady-state heat conduction described by elliptic partial differential equations and involving a one-dimensional cooling element represented by a contour on which interface boundary conditions are specified. The problem consists of finding an optimal shape of the cooling element which will ensure that the solution in a given region is close (in the least squares sense) to some prescribed target distribution. We formulate this problem as PDE-constrained optimization and the locally optimal contour shapes are found using a gradient-based descent algorithm in which the Sobolev shape gradients are obtained using methods of the shape-differential calculus. The main novelty of this work is an accurate and efficient approach to the evaluation of the shape gradients based on a boundary-integral formulation which exploits certain analytical properties of the...