With the continuous rise in the power of chips for electric vehicle controllers, traditional air or liquid cooling can no longer meet the current heat dissipation requirements of such controllers. To meet the thermal management requirements of electric vehicle controllers, this study designs and optimizes a novel biomimetic honeycomb microchannel heat exchanger (HMHE) based on the leaf vein fractal network and honeycomb structure. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was employed to establish the simulation model of HMHE, and the effects of honeycomb grade, channel width ratio ( r c ), channel width ( a 1 ) and channel depth ( H ch ) on the performance of HMHE were investigated. The comprehensive performance of HMHEs was compared using Figure of Merit ( FOM) , determining that the three-level Honeycomb Microchannel Heat Exchanger (L3-HMHE) exhibits the optimal performance. Meanwhile, through single-parameter optimization, it was confirmed that the optimal structural parameter range of L3-HMHE is around r c =0.9, a 1 =8 mm and H ch =18 mm. Based on the optimization strategy combined with the Response Surface Methodology (RSM), a quantitative correlation model between the structural parameters of L3-HMHE and FOM was established. It was found that the channel width has the most significant impact on the comprehensive performance of the heat exchanger, while the optimal channel structural parameters are r c =0.8, a 1 =9 mm and H ch =18 mm, respectively. By comparing the results of numerical simulations and actual experiments, the temperature performance errors and pressure drop errors of the L3-HMHE between numerical simulations and actual experiments are maintained within 6.5% and 11%, respectively, at the load powers of 100 W, 120 W and 140 W, which validates the established numerical simulation model of the L3-HMHE. The FOM of the optimized L3-HMHE reaches 1.283, representing a 77.2% improvement compared with the traditional U-shaped heat exchanger, and it can satisfy the heat transfer requirements under a stable heat generation power of 200 W. The research results provide new insights into the structural design of HMHEs and promote the application of L3-HMHEs in the thermal management of electric vehicle controllers.
Zhang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.