A PLUGIN FRAMEWORK FOR LARGE-SCALE MULTI-FORMULATION TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION

Topology optimization is a design computational method that aims to find the best distribution of material to maximize some performance measures within a given domain under prescribed constraints. The technique has found a wide range of applications due to its flexibility in addressing different problems. In particular, the pioneering work of Sigmund [1] and Bendsøe and Kikuchi [2] on single and multiple materials has paved the way for developing new formulations and educational codes. These codes demonstrate the potentiality of topology optimization in structural mechanics to generate optimized layouts. Advances and extensions have been proposed, including periodic and non-periodic microstructures. Motivated by these previous works, we propose a plugin-based framework that allows the treatment of a multi-material formulation for large-scale structural problems. Standard compliance minimization is used, and the proposed implementation enables handling multiple materials with different stiffness properties, i.e., isotropic and anisotropic materials, as well as various constraints. The plugins are implemented to allow the user to customize the specific problem to address. Moreover, the software allows new features to be added to the pre-existing code to extend or change the formulation already implemented. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the capabilities and validate the main features of the proposed framework. The authors are investigating potential extensions of this work to consider more complex formulations, such as stress constraints and multiphysics problems.