Constructal Design of an E-shaped cavity intruded for refrigeration of a heat generating body

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to investigate, through the Construtal Design method, the geometric effect of an E-finned cavity inserted in a solid body with internal heat generation. The main objective of the study is to obtain cavity geometry that leads to a lower maximum temperature in the system. Optimum configurations are also obtained for different fractions of area between the conducting body, cavity and fin. The system was assumed to be two-dimensional and the prescribed and convective temperature conditions were considered in the cavity and fin walls. The numerical solution of the problem was obtained with the PDETOOL tool, Partial Differential Equations Tool, of MATLAB® software, which solves the heat diffusion equation by the finite element method. The Construtal Design method was adequate to obtain the optimal geometric configurations of the system, since the maximum temperature of the heated body was minimized, making it possible to obtain a configuration that balanced the distribution of temperatures in the system in favor of the objective function according to the principles of the Constructal Theory. In addition, it was verified that the optimized results presented performance gains of up to 74% in relation to the cases of lower performance evaluated.