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Open-Source Codes of Topology Optimization: A Summary for Beginners to Start Their Research

by Yingjun Wang^1,*, Xinqing Li¹, Kai Long², Peng Wei³

1 National Engineering Research Center of Novel Equipment for Polymer Processing, The Key Laboratory of Polymer Processing Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Technique and Equipment for Macromolecular Advanced Manufacturing, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510641, China
2 State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, 102206, China
3 State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science, School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510641, China

* Corresponding Author: Yingjun Wang. Email:

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2023, 137(1), 1-34. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2023.027603

Received 05 November 2022; Accepted 03 January 2023; Issue published 23 April 2023

Abstract

Topology optimization (TO), a numerical technique to find the optimal material layout with a given design domain, has attracted interest from researchers in the field of structural optimization in recent years. For beginners, opensource codes are undoubtedly the best alternative to learning TO, which can elaborate the implementation of a method in detail and easily engage more people to employ and extend the method. In this paper, we present a summary of various open-source codes and related literature on TO methods, including solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP), evolutionary method, level set method (LSM), moving morphable components/voids (MMC/MMV) methods, multiscale topology optimization method, etc. Simultaneously, we classify the codes into five levels, from easy to dicult, depending on their diculty, so that beginners can get started and understand the form of code implementation more quickly.

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