Two-scale design of porosity-like materials using adaptive geometric components

Abstract

This paper is an extension of our recent work that presents a two-scale design method of porosity-like materials using adaptive geometric components. The adaptive geometric components consist of two classes of geometric components: one describes the overall structure at the macrostructure and the other describes the structure of the material at the microstructures. A smooth Heaviside-like elemental-density function is obtained by projecting these two classes on a finite element mesh, namely fixed to reduce meshing computation. The method allows simultaneous optimization of both the overall shape of the macrostructure and the material structure at the micro-level without additional techniques (i.e., material homogenization), connection constraints, and local volume constraints, as often seen in most existing methods. Some benchmark structural design problems are investigated and a selected design is post-processed for 3D printing to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords:

topology optimization; concurrent optimization; porosity structures; two-scale topology optimization; adaptive geometric components.