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Using the Topology Optimization Interface and Study Step

In Part 9 of this course on optimization, we resume with the beam topology optimization example from the previous part to address various topics, such as the Topology Optimization interface and study step. This includes discussions on optimization variables, material parameters, the logic in how we choose to formulate the objective function for the beam example, how exactly the density is modified in the Topology Link node under the Materials node, and the scaling of the objective function. Next, we compute a few variations of this model to better understand some of the Topology Optimization interface nodes and their settings. Some highlights of this include:

• Changing the control variable discretization element order to Constant
• Setting the Filter type to None to see the effect of filtering
• Changing the mesh refinement
• Resolving mesh sensitivity
• Extracting the optimized design for validation

From there, we move on to a new example that performs topology optimization of a bracket. We show how a filter dataset can be used as the basis for a verification analysis in a new model component. We then provide an overview of relevant resources on the COMSOL website.