Experiment driven ANN-GA based technique for optimal distribution of discrete heat sources under mixed convection

This article reports the results of mixed convection heat transfer studies from five heat sources (aluminum) mounted at different positions on a substrate board (Bakelite). The goal is to determine the optimal arrangement, such that, the maximum temperature excess is minimum among all the possible configurations. For accomplishing this, a completely experimental driven hybrid optimization strategy, that combines Artificial neural network (ANN) with Genetic algorithm (GA) is used. Initial optimization studies are carried out by employing a heuristic non-dimensional geometric parameter λ, which is identified to be the key parameter to decide the maximum temperature in the system. © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.