SA-SIMP

N. P. Garcia-Lopez et al. developed “An improved hybrid topology optimization approach coupling Simulated Annealing and SIMP (SA-SIMP)” (link). The topologies found by SA-SIMP method are reported to have round %6 higher rigidity than SIMP topologies and there are no gray elements, which have intermediate densities. However these results seem a bit artificial, the lack of gray points may be directly the cause of high rigidity. To be clearer, the topologies shown are almost exactly same except the gray elements. The point is if they were translated to real physical components, they would have to be smoothed and the resulting structures would be exactly the same. The stiffness of the topology optimization result is of no importance if it cannot be reflected to the real component. Practically SA-SIMP results are identical to SIMP results.