Additive Manufacturing Oriented Topology Optimization with Floating Projection and Proportional Updating Method

This paper aims to present some modifications in the well known proportional updating scheme for topological optimization of continuum structures. Yet, the density-based structural topology optimization has been widely used and developed by the optimization community. However, there are still some shortcomings in the design of structures to be producible by the current additive manufacturing techniques. Also, the solid isotropic material with penalization parameterization of structures, which is the most familiar density-based approach has made it more difficult to obtain structures to be suitable for additive manufacturing. This is due to the existence or appearance of elements with intermediate densities and the utilized structured finite element fixed grid mesh. The proportional updating scheme for topological design which has been recently presented to be an efficient approach is also using the aforementioned parameterization. Also, there has not yet been any improvement to adopt it with additive manufacturing constraints. In the present work, the floating projection is utilized to determine a binary and smooth density field from the proportional method, while the constraints related to additive manufacturing are also considered.