The paper presents an efficient 88 line MATLAB code for topology optimization. It has been developed using the 99 line code presented by Sigmund ( 2001) as a starting point. The original code has been extended by a density filter, and a considerable improvement in efficiency has been achieved, mainly by preallocating arrays and vectorizing loops. A speed improvement with a factor of 100 is obtained for a benchmark example with 7500 elements. Moreover, the length of the code has been reduced to a mere 88 lines. These improvements have been accomplished without sacrificing the readability of the code. The 88 line code can therefore be considered as a valuable successor to the 99 line code, providing a practical instrument that may help to ease the learning curve for those entering the field of topology optimization. The paper also discusses simple extensions of the basic code to include recent PDE-based and black-andwhite projection filtering methods. The complete 88 line code is included as an appendix and can be downloaded from the web site www.topopt.dtu.dk.

In the design of industrial products ranging from hearing aids to automobiles and aeroplanes, material is distributed so as to maximize the performance and minimize the cost. Historically, human intuition and insight have driven the evolution of mechanical design, recently assisted by computer-aided design approaches. The computer-aided approach known as topology optimization enables unrestricted design freedom and shows great promise with regard to weight savings, but its applicability has so far been limited to the design of single components or simple structures, owing to the resolution limits of current optimization methods. Here we report a computational morphogenesis tool, implemented on a supercomputer, that produces designs with giga-voxel resolution-more than two orders of magnitude higher than previously reported. Such resolution provides insights into the optimal distribution of material within a structure that were hitherto unachievable owing to the challenges of scaling up existing modelling and optimization frameworks. As an example, we apply the tool to the design of the internal structure of a full-scale aeroplane wing. The optimized full-wing design has unprecedented structural detail at length scales ranging from tens of metres to millimetres and, intriguingly, shows remarkable similarity to naturally occurring bone structures in, for example, bird beaks. We estimate that our optimized design corresponds to a reduction in mass of 2-5 per cent compared to currently used aeroplane wing designs, which translates into a reduction in fuel consumption of about 40-200 tonnes per year per aeroplane. Our morphogenesis process is generally applicable, not only to mechanical design, but also to flow systems, antennas, nano-optics and micro-systems.

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We present a method to design manufacturable extremal elastic materials. Extremal materials can possess interesting properties such as a negative Poisson's ratio. The effective properties of the obtained microstructures are shown to be close to the theoretical limit given by mathematical bounds, and the deviations are due to the imposed manufacturing constraints. The designs are generated using topology optimization. Due to high resolution and the imposed robustness requirement they are manufacturable without any need for post-processing. This has been validated by the manufacturing of an isotropic material with a Poisson's ratio of ν = −0.5 and a bulk modulus of 0.2% times the solid base material's bulk modulus.

Numerical homogenization is an efficient way to determine effective macroscopic properties, such as the elasticity tensor, of a periodic composite material. In this paper an educational description of the method is provided based on a short, self-contained Matlab implementation. It is shown how the basic code, which computes the effective elasticity tensor of a two material composite, where one material could be void, is easily extended to include more materials. Furthermore, extensions to homogenization of conductivity, thermal expansion, and fluid permeability are described in detail. The unit cell of the periodic material can take the shape of a square, rectangle, or parallelogram, allowing for all kinds of 2D periodicities.