ELEMENT EXCHANGE METHOD

ELEMENT EXCHANGE METHOD studied by Mohammad Rouhi is a non-gradient based method (link). It relies on exchanging lowest and highest strain energy elements, thus step by step reaching convergence. In the thesis it is shown that the method finds similar solutions to SIMP, despite not as efficient, as it requires more iterations. It is however faster than other non-gradient based methods. There are no intermediate densities, which is an advantage in many cases. The method deals with checkerboard problem in a novel way. Also the initial distribution is random.