Revisiting p-refinement in structural topology optimization. (December 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Xiao, Manyu; Mukherjee, Sougata; Raghavan, Balaji; Dutta, Subhrajit; Breitkopf, Piotr; Zhang, Weihong
• Is Part Of: Structures. Volume 34(2021)
• Page Start: 3640
• Page End: 3646
• Publication Date: 2021-12
• Subjects: Interpolation -- Numerical instability -- Finite element -- Serendipity element -- Lagrangian; Structural engineering -- Periodicals; 624.1
• DOI: 10.1016/j.istruc.2021.09.078
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2352-0124

Abstract

Abstract: The results obtained in traditional topology optimization with a single density design variable assigned to each element, are typically improved through h-refinement where the resolution of the FE mesh is scaled up along with the number of density elements/voxels, without increasing the order of the finite element interpolation. Higher order elements allow a more realistic simulation of the physics without some of the spurious results associated with lower order elements, including improved numerical instability as a tertiary advantage. In this work, we conduct a detailed investigation of p-refinement in the context of SIMP topology optimization including optimized topologies, compliance values and CPU clock time, for various 2D classical benchmark problems.