BOUNDARY ELEMENT TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION OF ANISOTROPIC MEDIA

Resumo

The objective of this work is to present the implementation of a topological sensitivity based
material removal procedure in a standard Boundary Element Method formulation. The approach used
selects the areas showing the lowest sensitivities, where material is removed by opening a small cavity.
As the iterative process evolves, the original domain has volume progressively removed, until a desired
material volume is achieved. Because the Boundary Element Method does not employ domain meshes
in linear cases, the resulting topologies are completely devoid of intermediary material densities.
Additionally, with Bézier Curves, a method of smoothing lines was implemented during the topological
optimization scheme, aiming to reduce some usual problems in the optimization process, such as the
irregularity of the boundaries, eliminating the need for post-processing and reducing the computational
cost of the process. Anisotropic elastic cases are presented and compared with their isotropic counterpart
optimums.