Topology optimization methods have widely been used in various industries, owing to their potential for providing promising design candidates for mechanical devices. However, their applications are usually limited to the objects which do not move significantly due to the difficulty in computationally efficient handling of the contact and interactions among multiple structures or with boundaries by conventionally used simulation techniques. In the present study, we propose a topology optimization method for moving objects incorporating the material point method, which is often used to simulate the motion of objects in the field of computer graphics. Several numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and the utility of the proposed method.
@article{arxiv.2203.16793,
title = {Topology optimization of locomoting soft bodies using material point method},
author = {Yuki Sato and Hiroki Kobayashi and Changyoung Yuhn and Atsushi Kawamoto and Tsuyoshi Nomura and Noboru Kikuchi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.16793},
year = {2023}
}