Abstract

The widespread availability of computational engineering software and recent advances in fabrication are enabling the design of optimised structures with ever increasing geometric complexity. This talk will review our recent work on structural optimisation that combines multiresolution shape editing and immersed finite element techniques with classical shape and topology derivatives. During the computations, the geometry of the to be optimised structure is represented with a sequence of increasingly finer surface meshes that can capture geometric details at various resolutions. Using an immersed finite element technique the structure is analysed without the burden and cost of creating high-quality conforming meshes. Relative to traditional approaches, the fine-grained geometry control provided by multiresolution optimisation results in finding much better performing designs. Moreover, the b-splines employed in multiresolution editing can readily be utilised in computer aided design software for downstream applications.