Recent Progress in Preliminary Design of Mechanical Components with Topology Optimization

Abstract

This paper reports some novel contributions to topology optimisation techniques. Two areas will be addressed. The first one is concerned with recent progress related to the perimeter method of topology optimisation. The perimeter method, which was originally introduced by Haber et al (1996) in topology optimisation, consists in bounding the perimeter of the material distribution in addition to itsarea. At first recent research focussed on extending the method to 3-D structures. Then other work was made to new quasi-isotropic measures of the perimeter that are nearly insensitive to the mesh.