A new variational approach for the thermodynamic topology optimization of hyperelastic structures

Abstract

We present a novel approach to topology optimization based on thermodynamic extremal principles. This approach comprises three advantages: (1) it is valid for arbitrary hyperelastic material formulations while avoiding artificial procedures that were necessary in our previous approaches for topology optimization based on thermodynamic principles; (2) the important constraints of bounded relative density and total structure volume are fulfilled analytically which simplifies the numerical implementation significantly; (3) it possesses a mathematical structure that allows for a variety of numerical procedures to solve the problem of topology optimization without distinct optimization routines. We present a detailed model derivation including the chosen numerical discretization and show the validity of the approach by simulating two boundary value problems with large deformations.