Abstract

Topology optimization is able to provide unintuitive and innovative design solutions and a performance improvement (e.g. weight savings) in excess of 50% is not uncommonly demonstrated in a wide range of engineering design problems. With the rise of advance materials and additive manufacturing, topology optimization is attracting much attention in the recent years. This presentation will introduce topology optimization in structural design, fiber composites and architected material. It will also include more recent advances topology optimization, multiscale design optimization breaking down the barrier between material and structural designs. Another direction of interests in large-scale topology optimization using the latest sparse data structures tailored to novel level set method. We have demonstrated an order of magnitude improvements on both the memory footage and the computation time. These efforts represent a pathway to applying topology optimization for complex multiphysics multifunctional structures, which may be too complex to rely on designers’ intuition.