Hinge-Free Compliant Mechanism Design via the Topological Level-Set

The objective of this paper is to introduce and demonstrate a new method for the topology optimization of compliant mechanisms. The proposed method relies on exploiting the topological derivative, and it exhibits numerous desirable properties including: (1) the mechanisms are hinge-free, (2) mechanisms with different geometric and mechanical advantages can be generated by varying a single control parameter, (3) a target volume fraction need not specified; instead numerous designs, of decreasing volume fractions, are generated in a single optimization run, and (4) the underlying finite element stiffness matrices are well-conditioned, permitting the use of high-performance iterative solvers. The proposed method and implementation are illustrated through numerical experiments in 2D and 3D.