An Efficient Tradeoff Approach for Topology Optimization With Manufacturing Constraints

In this paper an efficient approach for generating tradeoff curves when performing topology optimization with manufacturing constraints is presented. By minimizing a new stiffness-volume ratio, or in-fact a new compliance-volume product, the tradeoff curve is generated by changing a new design parameter. The volume appearing in the objective is raised to the power of this new design parameter. In such manner different conceptual designs can be generated. By adopting a nested approach, the problem is easily solved by a simple numerical scheme. This is a nice feature of the approach which makes the numerical performance most efficient and robust. This feature makes it also easy to include manufacturing constraints by simply updating the move limits such that these constraints are satisfied. The design parametrization is done by the SIMP-model and patterns of checker-boards are prevented by adopting Sigmund’s filter. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated by presenting tradeoff curves for both 2D- and 3D-problems.