Comparison of different commercial topology optimisation software for static and dynamic problems and applications to additive manufacturing

Topology optimisation is a structural design method that provides lightweighting under certain boundary conditions by redistributing the amount of material available in the design to serve the objective function, taking into account certain manufacturing and design constraints. Due to the fact that the geometries obtained by topology optimisation usually have complex, thin elements and free-form surfaces, the capabilities of traditional manufacturing methods are insufficient, which has paved the way for the development of innovative manufacturing methods for the manufacturability of these structures. Due to the high potential of additive manufacturing technologies as a manufacturing method for such complex structures, there have been many case studies on topology optimisation and additive manufacturing in both commercial and academic fields. However, the ability of commercial optimisation software available in the market to construct similar problems is open to debate. In this study, commercial optimisation software such as Altair HyperWorks, Ansys and nTop are comparatively examined for their ability to set up, solve, evaluate and validate for both static and dynamic problems and their applications to additive manufacturing are studied.