Optimal design of a multi-branch conducting path for area-to-point heat conduction using multi-objective optimization

•A multi-branch conducting path is proposed for area-to-point heat conduction.•Correlations for the average temperature and average thermal conductivity are built.•Effects of the geometric parameters on the heat conduction are analyzed.•A series of Pareto optimality-based multi-branch conducting paths are obtained. A multi-branch conducting path is proposed to cooling of a two-dimensional heat-generation domain. The structure of the multi-branch conducting path contains two parts, a rectangle connecting to the low-temperature heat sink and multiple branches stretching to the domain boundary. Area-to-point heat conduction by the multi-branch conducting path was investigated by numerical simulation. To perform the geometric optimization for the conducting path, the relationship between the cooling capacity, conductance cost, and the conducting structure were evaluated quantitatively using the response surface methodology. A multi-objective optimization with respect to the cooling capacity and conductance cost was then conducted. Finally, a series of Pareto optimality-based multi-branch structures were obtained by conducting the multi-objective optimization. Compared with the uniform conducting structure, the Pareto optimality-based multi-branch structure can reduce the average temperature by up to 16.02%. In addition, the cooling capacity of the optimized multi-branch structure can approach that of the optimal tree-shaped structure.