Giga-voxel topology optimization for GPU

Arnoud Delissen

Topology optimization is a popular tool to generate structural designs in an automated manner. However, it is a computationally expensive procedure, especially because the geometric resolution in the designs is related to the number of finite elements: more design resolution means more computational effort. Therefore by parallelizing the finite element calculations on a GPU, and making use of a voxel-grid (all elements have the same element matrix), significant speedups can be achieved. The goal is to perform a topology optimization of the entire Flying-V airplane structure, containing billions of elements.