A LEVEL SET-BASED APPROACH FOR SIMULTANEOUS OPTIMIZATION OF THE STRUCTURAL TOPOLOGY AND THE LAYOUT OF EMBEDDING STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS

A novel numerical approach for the simultaneous optimization of structural topology and the layout of embedding structural components is proposed. The distinctive feature of this approach is that a level set function is employed to describe the arbitrary irregular shape of embedding structural components implicitly. With the use of this description, the non-overlap constraints for embedding structural components can be dealt with in a convenient way. Numerical examples demonstrated that the comparison with the existing methods in the literature, the simultaneous optimization of the structural topology and components layout can be achieved via the present approach with much less computational effort.