ADAPTIVE TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION FOR ADDITIVE LAYER MANUFACTURING

A computer-aided FEM-based structure design system configured to: ■ acquire an initial structure design configuration comprising: - a design domain (Ω), - an applied load (f), and - constrained, unconstrained and loaded areas (ΓD, ΓF, ΓΝ); ■ compute an initial mesh (Toh) of the design domain (Ω); ■ compute a topological^ optimized structure model by iterating, until a termination criterion is fulfilled: - computing an optimized structure topology by properly implementing the SIMP (Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization) algorithm based on a density function (p) that represents the distribution of the material in the structure; - computing an anisotropic recovery-based a posteriori error estimator (η) that quantifies the error between the gradient of the exact structure material density (p) and the gradient of the FEM-computed approximation thereof, - computing a metric (Mk+1) for anisotropic mesh adaptation based on the anisotropic recovery-based a posteriori error estimator (η), and - computing an adapted anisotropic mesh (Tkh+ 1 ) based on the metric (Mk+1).