Evolution of 2D Truss Structures using Topology Optimization Technique with Meshless Method

This paper describes a new topology optimization (TO) technique based on meshless method to evolve two-dimensional truss structures. The meshless method has been considered as a very attractive computational technique since it does not need any mesh generation process during the analysis. It has been gradually and widely used in many engineering disciplines and a particular weak point such as the re-generation of mesh information inherit in other numerical analysis techniques have been naturally solved. However, there have been a few applications of meshless method into structural design optimization so that we here try to apply the meshless method into structural topology optimization problem. We adopt the radial point interpolation method (RPIM) which uses radial basis function (RBF) since it is stable and robust for arbitrary nodal distributions. Then, the hard kill method based on fully stressed design scheme is consistently combined with the adopted meshless method. In order to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed topology optimization technique, several benchmark tests are tackled to investigate the accuracy and capability of the present TO technique. From numerical results, it is found to be that the proposed TO technique is very simple and easy to produce the optimum topologies of plane structures.