Work

Sketch-Guided Topology Optimization with Enhanced Diversity for Innovative Structural Design

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Topology optimization (TO) is a powerful generative design tool for innovative structural design, capable of optimizing material distribution to generate structures with superior performance. However, current topology optimization algorithms mostly target a single objective and are highly dependent on the problem definition parameters, causing two critical issues: limited human controllability and solution diversity. These issues often lead to burdensome design iterations and insufficient design exploration. This paper proposes a multi-solution TO framework to address them. Human designers express their stylistic preferences for structures through sketches which are decomposed into stroke and closed-shape elements to flexibly guide each TO process. Sketch-based constraints are integrated with Fourier mapping-based length-scale control to enhance human controllability. Solution diversity is achieved by perturbing Fourier mapping frequencies and load conditions in the neural implicit TO framework. Adaptive parallel scale adjustment is incorporated to reduce the computational cost for design exploration. Using the structural design of a wheel spoke as a case study, the mechanical performance and diversity of the generated TO solutions as well as the effectiveness of human control are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results reveal that the sketch-based constraints and length-scale control have distinct control effects on structural features and have different impacts on the mechanical performance and diversity, thereby enabling fine-grained and flexible human controllability to better balance conflicting objectives.

Source: Applied Sciences

DOI: 10.3390/app15052753