Miriam Kick, M. Sc.

Usually, real-world materials behave in a non-linear way, e.g. plasticity. Therefore, highly loaded materials show an irreversible deformation and thus, a weakening of the component. To account for this behavior, it is important to account for the influence of the real material behavior during the design and optimization of the component. Unfortunately, the implementation of a complex material model, such as plasticity, in topology optimization leads to a greatly increased computational effort, since the material behavior needs to be simulated within several load steps in each optimization step.

A novel material model developed at IKM for the Thermodynamic Topology Optimization (TTO) enables the efficient simulation of hardening material behavior with only one simulation needed per optimization step. In the model, an arbitrary real material behavior can be phenomenologically approximated on the basis of experimentally determinable material parameters. In addition, it is important to check whether the developed method also works in practice. Therefore, the method is validated by suitable experiments with additively manufactured optimized structures.