A 55-line code for large-scale parallel topology optimization in 2D and 3D

Abstract

This paper presents a 55-line code written in python for 2D and 3D topology optimization (TO) based on the open-source finite element computing software (FEniCS), equipped with various finite element tools and solvers. PETSc is used as the linear algebra back-end, which results in significantly less computational time than standard python libraries. The code is designed based on the popular solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP) methodology. Extensions to multiple load cases, different boundary conditions, and incorporation of passive elements are also presented. Thus, this implementation is the most compact implementation of SIMP based topology optimization for 3D as well as 2D problems.Utilizing the concept of Euclidean distance matrix to vectorize the computation of the weight matrix for the filter, we have achieved a substantial reduction in the computational time and have also made it possible for the code to work with complex ground structure configurations. We have also presented the code's extension to large-scale topology optimization problems with support for parallel computations on complex structural configuration, which could help students and researchers explore novel insights into the TO problem with dense meshes. Appendix A contains the complete code, and the website: https: //github.com/iitrabhi/topo-fenics also contains the complete code.