A Quadratic Boundary Implementation for Solving 2D Problems of Elasticity by Topology Optimization

Abstract

The main goal of this work relies on implementing discontinuous quadratic elements on a previous existent optimization code. The existent code refers to problems of topology optimization using a standard Boundary Element Method (BEM) formulation. A Topological Derivative (DT) is used for determining the domains sensitivity. The implicit cost function used for DTderivation is based on the total potential energy. A fixed amount of material with less efficiency is progressively removed during the optimization process. It is expected that the quadratic elements implementation increases the accuracy of the final solution, since the previous code were implemented by using linear elements. Despite of this code is still under development the final topology presents a good agreement when compared with those presented in the literature.