TOPACIUS

Topology Optimization of structures with Advanced Constraints including diynamic phenomena, bUckling and nonlinear Scenarios

In a globalized world, the competitiveness of the productive fabric is based on innovation and cost reduction. Moreover, as reflected in "SDG 9: Build resilient infrastructures, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation", society requires greater sustainability. In this regard, structural optimization is an ideal tool to reduce production costs and carbon footprint through the efficient use of materials. Within this branch, topology optimization of structures is a discipline that goes one step further. In addition to seeking the best design of a preset typology, it completely replaces the design phase and provides the optimal typology and design. In a broad sense it can be thought of as a kind of artificial intelligence that decides in which parts of a given domain it is necessary to place material, thus forming the optimal structure.

The general objective of the TOPACIUS project is to advance in the development of topology optimization formulations for structures that allow the incorporation of the real conditions that need to be satisfied in practice. Thus, formulations of the topology optimization problem of minimum weight structures with stress constraints are now common. In this way, conditions are applied to the design that were not necessarily fulfilled before, since they were not previously considered. These approaches are more in line with real cases although they require more sophisticated models and many computational resources, an that is the reason why they have hardly been studied until now.

The TOPACIUS project intends to continue in this line of incorporating more design conditions that allow the optimal solutions obtained to be really usable in practice. In real problems, stress constraints are essential, but they are not sufficient to guarantee the validity of the designs. It is also necessary to check and limit buckling instabilities as well as dynamic effects, when they occur. From a practical point of view, there are many areas of application in which optimized designs represent a leap in product quality and innovation.