Comparison Study of FEM and IGA Based Topology Optimization Methods for Elastic Structures
摘要
Topology Optimization (TO) is an effective numerical technique by which one can obtain the optimal material layout of the design domain satisfying an objective function and a set of constraints. In general, the optimization tool is coupled with an analysis tool to determine the unknowns. Finite Element Method (FEM) is widely used as an analysis tool until the advent of Isogeometric Analysis (IGA). In literature, IGA has been reported to perform better in comparison to FEM, as the former one considers exact geometry for analysis, yielding more accurate results while using lesser degrees of freedom. In this paper, we try to compare the performance of both FEM and IGA based Topology optimization tools in terms of computational time, value of the objective function obtained, and the number of degrees of freedom involved in the analyses.