Using Element Exchanged Method in 3-Dimensional Structural Topology Optimization

For the past research of structural topology optimization, mostly limited to two-dimensional space, greatly limiting the scope of application. To widely use in more kinds of issues, an attempts to expand the subject into three-dimensional space is proposed in this thesis. Since the three-dimensional structural analysis will be more complex and difficult, in this thesis, the FEM commercial software ABAQUS is used as an analysis engine, and MATLAB is used to do the iteration. Element Exchange Method（EEM; Rouhi et al. 2010）uses a series of discrete design variables, more suitable for ABAQUS than other methods of continuous design variables. In this thesis, the first part is about coding the structure topology optimization. We investigated the writing rules of ABAQUS input and output file, then used MATLAB to read and write. In the MATLAB code, there are four module: data acquisition, optimization, model modification, and analyzes driving. In addition, we added four features: non-design area, synchronous exchanging, multiple combinations of force, and determine the initial topology automatically. The second part is testing. We used examples from past research, and some own designed example to do the optimization. The result shape shows that the materials have a better performance.