Challenges and opportunities in modeling and implementing additive manufacturing technologies for thermal management applications

This thesis investigates the thermo-hydraulic performance of advanced cooling architectures for gas turbine and power electronics thermal management, with a focus on structures enabled by additive manufacturing (AM). The work is structured in two parts. The first part presents a systematic numerical characterization of smooth geometries across multiple architecture families, varying key parameters such as porosity, unit-cell size, and axial/lateral stretching. Results are benchmarked against classical cooling channels. The second part extends the analysis to as-built conditions by developing an AM-aware CFD methodology that explicitly accounts for surface roughness effects typical of metal AM parts. Two model corrections, for frictional losses and heat transfer, are implemented and validated across two application contexts: gas turbine cooling (using experimental coupon-level datasets) and a power electronics cooling system developed and tested in collaboration with an automotive industrial partner. The thesis concludes by delivering an integrated design workflow combining AM process optimization with calibrated CFD, offering a practical framework for the robust numerical design of additively manufactured cooling solutions.