anybody have experience with topological optimization ?

Hi,

I've worked a lot with topology optimization in my research and I know through contacts in industry that the method is used (but not widely) to solve practical problems. It's a beautiful method for doing really basic design but keep a few things in mind.

First, you should start out with a large domain - much larger than the original - and let the optimizer remove material. If you start from a small design space you will probably not gain very much. Second, the optimized structure is not the "final" structure in the sense that you need to do post-processing. This constitutes "smoothing out the structure" to remove rough edges on the optimized design. The rough edges occur since the optimizer is essentially "turning off" elements where they are not needed leaving the boundary anything but smooth.

To the best of my knowledge the topology optimization facility it Ansys works fine although it is limited in versatility. In any case the optimization will probably give you a pretty good idea of which kind of design you should go for.

Good luck!

Cheers,

jstegmann.