A Modified Volumetric Penalization Method for Gray Elements Suppression

The volumetric penalization approach is an important method for gray elements suppression in topology optimization. With the volumetric penalization approach, the topology optimization problem is consistent and regularized, and topology description is unambiguous. Considering the fact that an unreasonable topological form of structure is sometimes resulted with the traditional volumetric penalization function, a modified function is proposed. By utilizing the modified function, the gray elements are compelled to be 0 or 1, and the efficiency of optimization solving is also improved. To verify the validity of the modified method, it is compared with the famous volumetric penalization method, SINH method, through a typical example. Simultaneously, its numerical instabilities are also analyzed.