Design study of the heat switch base plate with single and multi-material topology optimization

A miniaturized heat switch is a device under the development dedicated to control automatic cooling of a space instrument box. The design study presented in this paper focuses on a stiffness issue of the switch base plate which should assure good thermal contact with the instrument box. Due to inner deformations of the switch, base plate deforms which might decrease contact area needed to the heat transfer. Thus several design concepts of the copper base plate were investigated and multimaterial additive manufacturing was reviewed. One approach was to decrease deformations of existing geometry by multi-material design by local exchange of copper with steel, first by engineering intuition, then by the stiffness based topology optimization, and finally with the layer-wise topology optimization better respecting manufacturing possibilities. Another approach was to change the geometry and use the topology optimization constrained with a flatness of the base plate but with single material. Finally, deformation changes of all the variants were compared.