Abstract—A heat pipe optimization is known as a difficult one because design variables have nonlinear interaction one another and multiple constraints are involved. it is unsuitable to Gradient-based methods. The object of present study is to optimize the design variables of the heat pipe for a space application using an evolutionary method. In this study, Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) method, simple heuristic search method, is used to estimate variables and improve search efficiency. The heat pipe configuration is optimized regarding to seven parameters, such as diameter of vapor core, thickness of wick, etc., and eighteen constraints including operational, dimensional, and structural ones. To verify the performance of the PSO method, a minimum total mass estimation and searching efficiency are compared with results obtained by generalized extremal optimization(GEO). It is proven that PSO found optimized solutions effectively than GEO for simultaneous estimation of multi-parameters.

Index Terms—Optimization design, particle swarm optimization (PSO), heat pipe, mesh wick.

Kwonho Kim and Sung Wook Baek are with the Aerospace engineering, KAIST, 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea (e-mail: bloodyred@kaist.ac.kr, swbaek@kaist.ac.kr).
Kyun Ho Lee is with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Sejong University, 98 Gunja-dong, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul 143-747, Republic of Korea(e-mail: khlee0406@sejong.ac.kr).