A Cell-Based Linear Smoothed Finite Element Method for Polygonal Topology Optimization

The aim of this work is to employ a modified cell-based smoothed finite element method (S-FEM) for topology optimization with the domain discretized with arbitrary polygons. In the present work, the linear polynomial basis function is used as the weight function instead of the constant weight function used in the standard S-FEM. This improves the accuracy and yields an optimal convergence rate. The gradients are smoothed over each smoothing domain, then used to compute the stiffness matrix.Within the proposed scheme, an optimum topology procedure is conducted over the smoothing domains. Structural materials are distributed over each smoothing domain and the filtering scheme relies on the smoothing domain. Numerical tests are carried out to pursue the performance of the proposed optimization by comparing convergence, efficiency and accuracy.