Previous versions of the Material Mask Overlay Strategy (MMOS) for topology synthesis have primarily employed circular masks to simulate voids within the design region. MMOS operates on the photolithographic principle by appropriately positioning and sizing a group of negative masks to create voids within the design region and thus iteratively improve the material layout to meet the desired objective. The fundamental notion has been that a group of circular masks can represent a local void of any shape. Thus, circular masks, as opposed to those modeled using simple, non-intersecting, closed curves of generic shapes, have been employed. This paper investigates whether employing masks of more general shapes (e.g., any two-dimensional polygon) offers significant enhancements in efficiently attaining the appropriate topological features in a continuum. Here, performance of two other mask shapes, namely, elliptical and rectangular are compared with that of the circular masks. For fair comparison, two mean compliance minimization examples under resource constraints are solved as each design space is known to contain a unique minimum.

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