Post-Processing of non gradient-based Topology Optimization with Simulated Annealing

Topology optimization (TO) is a mathematical method of determining distribution of material in a design domain to achieve maximum performance for the desired application. Non-gradient-based topology optimization methods are beneficial for the problems in which the derivative of the objective function is not easy or even possible to calculate. The results coming from such methods include gray area and discontinuity based on the optimization algorithm. In this paper, a post-processing algorithm is presented to improve the results from a nongradient topology optimization simulated annealing based process. It has been shown that the results using this post-processing method have less gray areas by fixing the densities of the elements. Therefore, better compliance values obtained for the cantilever and MBB beams problems regarding the results in the literature. The main advantage of post-processing is that the number of iterations can be reduced without sacrificing the quality of the results. This leads to improving the results as well as reducing the calculation costs by the faster convergence. Copyright (C) 2021 The Authors.