Adaptive thermodynamic topology optimization

Abstract

AbstractThe benefit of adaptive meshing strategies for a recently introduced thermodynamic topology optimization is presented. Employing an elementwise gradient penalization, stability is obtained and checkerboarding prevented while very fine structures can be resolved sharply using adaptive meshing at material-void interfaces. The usage of coarse elements and thereby smaller design space does not restrict the obtainable structures if a proper adaptive remeshing is considered during the optimization. Qualitatively equal structures and quantitatively the same stiffness as for uniform meshing are obtained with less degrees of freedom, memory requirement and overall optimization runtime. In addition, the adaptivity can be used to zoom into coarse global structures to better resolve details of interesting spots such as truss nodes.