Automatic Design of Transport Systems Through Topology Optimization on Adaptively Refined Computational Grids

Project Summary

Transport systems are technologically important across industry, engineering, and science. These systems are characterized by the flow of material and energy, include thermally and electrochemically driven reactions, and touch diverse applications including heat exchangers, absorbers, chemical reactors, batteries, process equipment, manufacturing, transportation, etc. The simultaneous occurrence of multiple physical phenomena makes the design of these systems especially challenging. Computational tools to simulate the performance of these systems exist, but there are limited tools to automate the design process. This project thus focused on applying computational design optimization to automatically design transport systems.

The first objective was to develop the formulation to allow for the architectural optimization of the transport problems and then to implement these into a computational design framework. The latter was accomplished using a combination of internal and opensource simulation and optimization tools. At its core, this framework is a combination of a forward simulation, a sensitivity calculation, an optimization, and an interface to connect these calculations. This results in the development of new solution techniques and general purpose software for parallel simulation and optimization. The second objective was to improve the accuracy of the calculations via adaptively refine grids. The principal outcome was a preliminary effort on using goal oriented mesh refinement to efficiently, and automatically, increase the mesh density at phase boundaries. Lastly, the framework was utilized for the automatic design of flow batteries, heat exchangers, flow manifolds, porous electrode, electric double layer capacitors, and thermal catalytic reactors, thus introducing architectural and topology optimization as a viable tool across transport system applications.

Mission Impact

This project grew Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) competency in the topology optimization of non-structural systems, and focused specifically on demonstrating and extending the use of existing techniques and tools at the Laboratory to create a new competency in the design of transport systems. This work has thus figured into multiple follow-on proposals, including external CRADAs with energy companies (TotalEnergies, OxEon, and Twelve), and is a component of DOE grants for the design of bioreactors and fluid manifolds for electrochemical reactors. This work thus addresses DOE's energy and environment missions, providing a new capability and tool to determine innovative solutions. Additionally, this work supported several new scientific hires with core expertise in High Performance Computing, Optimization, and Applied Math. The efforts of this proposal will continue addressing research needs for the design of transport systems across projects at LLNL, DOE, and industry.

Publications, Presentations, and Patents

Franco, Michael, Jean-Sylvain Camier, Julian Andrej, and Will Pazner. "High-order matrix-free incompressible flow solvers with GPU acceleration and low-order refined preconditioners." Computers & Fluids 203 (2020): 104541.

Beck, Victor A., Jonathan J. Wong, Charles F. Jekel, Daniel A. Tortorelli, Sarah E. Baker, Eric B. Duoss, and Marcus A. Worsley. "Computational design of microarchitected porous electrodes for redox flow batteries." Journal of Power Sources 512 (2021): 230453.

Beck, Victor A., Sarah Baker, Jack T. Davis, Eric B. Duoss, Daniel A. Tortorelli, Seth E. Watts, Marcus A. Worsley. "Micro-architected flow through electrode for energy storage." US provisional patent. Filed February 10, 2021.

Beck, Victor A., Seth E. Watts, Jonathan J. Wong, Daniel A. Tortorelli, Sarah E. Baker, Eric B. Duoss, and Marcus A. Worsley. " Electrochemical Systems Optimization using Physics-Based Homogenization of the Microscopic Continuum Models." 14th World Congress in Computational Mechanics (WCCM) ECCOMAS Congress 2020, virtual, January 11-15 2021.

Beck, Victor A., Todd H. Weisgraber, Anna N. Ivanovskaya, Swetha Chandrasekaran, Bryan D. Moran, Seth E. Watts, Daniel A. Tortorelli, Eric B. Duoss, Juergen Biener, Michael Stadermann, and Marcus A. Worsley. "Optimally Engineered Flow-through Electrodes Using Automatic Design Algorithms and Additive Manufacturing." 235th Electrochemical Society Meeting, Dallas, TX, May 26-30 2019.

Beck, Victor A., Todd H. Weisgraber, Anna N. Ivanovskaya, Swetha Chandrasekaran, Bryan D. Moran, Seth E. Watts, Daniel A. Tortorelli, Eric B. Duoss, Juergen Biener, Michael Stadermann, and Marcus A. Worsley. "Optimally Engineered Flow-Through Electrodes using Topology Optimization and Additive Manufacturing." 2018 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting and Exhibit, Boston, MA, May 25-30 2018.

Lazarov, Boyan. "Adaptive mesh refinement in density-based topology optimization." 14th World Congress of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (WCSMO-14), Boulder, Colorado, June 13-18, 2021.

Roy, Thomas, "Preconditioning for Electrochemical Flow in Porous Media." SIAM Conference on Mathematical & Computational Issues in the Geosciences (GS21), virtual, June 21-24, 2021.

Salazar de Troya, Miguel, Victor A. Beck, and Marcus A. Worsley. "Topology Optimization of Supercapacitors." 14th World Congress of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (WCSMO-14), Boulder, Colorado, June 13-18, 2021.

Salazar de Troya, Miguel, Daniel A. Tortorelli, and Victor Beck. "Two-Dimensional Topology Optimization of Heat Exchangers with the Density and Level-Set Methods." 14th World Congress in Computational Mechanics (WCCM) ECCOMAS Congress 2020, virtual, January 11-15 2021.

Salazar de Troya, Miguel, Daniel A. Tortorelli, and Victor Beck. "Two-Dimensional Topology Optimization of Heat Exchangers with the Density and Level-Set Methods." SIAM CSE Congress 2021, virtual, March 1-5 2021.