Intact.Generative: A Plug&Play Approach for Topology Optimization of Thermal Control Systems

With funding from DARPA, Intact Solutions (IS) has developed Intact.Generative (IG), a plug-and-play topology optimization (TO) toolkit for structural and heat conduction based problems. In this project, we will extend IG into a robust commercial strength toolkit for TO of thermal/fluid components in thermal control systems. The innovative features of this project include:A modularized plug-and-play framework for multiphysics where users can customize the modules, e.g., plug-in turbulence models or add new physics. More importantly, users can plug-in their physis-based manufacturing modules to account for the rapidly evolving manufacturing techniques.Our algorithm does not rely on meshing the fluid and/or solid geometries. This paves the way for setting up an automated TO workflow which does not require user intervention for defeaturing and clean-up. Furthermore, it allows for interoperability with widely used simulation software such Abaqus/Ansys/NASTRAN/MFEM.We employ a CAD aware design methodology using implicit modeling, where the raw output geometries yielded by TO algorithm can be seamlessly exported to a typical CAD/CAE software in an automated way for downstream applications such as validating/certifying the optimized designs.The current state of the art (SOA)nbsp; topology optimization tools need to address several challenges before TO based approaches can become standard practice in the design of thermal/fluid and other components involving multiple physics simulations. Most of these challenges are related to modularization, meshing, automation, and interoperability. Our innovation, IG, adopts a plug-and-play approach based on a decoupled geometry-simulation framework and implicit modeling to seamlessly address these challenges. Consequently, IG will be the perfect tool that can help designers in the development of high-performance thermal control systems that can produces using modern manufacturing techniques.