Struct Multidisc Optim 24, 441448 Springer-Verlag 2003

Digital Object Identier (DOI) 10.1007/s00158-002-0257-4

Improving eciency of evolutionary structural optimization

by implementing xed grid mesh

H. Kim, O.M. Querin, G.P. Steven and Y.M. Xie

Abstract Evolutionary structural optimization (ESO)

has been shown through much published research to be
a simple and yet eective method for structural shape
and topology optimization. However, attention has been
drawn to shortcomings in the method related to the computational eciency of the algorithm as well as the jagged
edge representation of the Finite Element optimal solutions. In this paper a xed grid (FG) mesh is implemented
and an improved ESO methodology is introduced in order
to address these shortcomings. The examples show a signicant improvement in the solution time as well as eliminating the jagged edges and checkerboard patterns that
may appear in current solution topologies. In addition,
FG is applied to both stress based and stiness optimization. This paper demonstrates a simple implementation
of FG and the consequent improvement in the eciency
and practicality of the FG ESO formulation.
Key words topology optimization, ESO, xed grid,
checkerboard pattern

1
Introduction
The competitive and rapidly developing environment of
the engineering design industry demands faster and more
Received November 14, 2000
H. Kim1 , O.M. Querin2 , G.P. Steven3 and Y.M. Xie4
1

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath,

Bath BA2 7AY, UK
e-mail: h.a.kim@bath.ac.uk
2
School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds
LS2 9JT, UK
3
School of Engineering, University of Durham, Durham DH1
3LE UK
4
School of the Built Environment, Victoria University, PO
Box 14428, MCMC VIC 8001, Australia


Extended version of a paper presented at ASMO-2, held in
Swansea, UK, 2000

practical topology optimization methods. Evolutionary

structural optimization (ESO) has been introduced as
a simple and eective method for size, shape and topology
optimization. The wide range of ESO applications have
become proof of its versatility and its potential as a design
tool (Xie and Steven 1997).
However, the disadvantages of ESO have become apparent in high solution time and the appearance of the
optimum topology output. Due to the iterative and slow
nature of the ESO process a typical solution time is often
excessive for practical problems.
The other unfavourable feature is the nite element
representation of the nal optimum topology, identied
by the prole of the remaining elements edges. Whilst
this format can be viewed satisfactorily on a computer
screen, it takes a signicant time and eort to extract
the boundary in a format that most CAD/CAM systems
recognize. Furthermore, the boundaries are represented
by the jagged edges of the nite elements, which require
some smoothing or image ltering processing in order to
manufacture a smooth topology.
This paper addresses these problems by incorporating Fixed Grid (FG) into ESO. FG has been used to
model problems where the geometry or the physical properties of the domain change with time (Voller et al. 1990).
The advantage of FG is that simple modications enable the existing numerical formulation and solution to be
adapted to a changing environment. Garca and Steven
(2000) applied FG to elasticity problems. The study
showed that the reduction in solution time outweighs the
loss of accuracy in the analysis. The accuracy of a solution was found to be adequate for the initial stage of the
design process, where a design is subjected to frequent
changes. Also, despite the accuracy reduction, the form
of the stress eld is correct thereby making the ESO logic
work correctly.
Kim et al. (2000a) have made the implementation of
a FG into ESO, where a FG mesh represented the initial
design domain and ESO was applied to remove elements
with low stress values. This study clearly demonstrated
the benet to be gained in time reduction. It also proposed an algorithm, which converts a FG representation
to a boundary representation of a topology. However, optimization is still based on the presence or absence of

442
elements, and a conversion algorithm must be applied to
obtain a boundary representation of the topology.
This paper presents an improved FG ESO method,
which optimises the given design domain by modifying and adapting the boundaries. This new method not
only results in a reduction of solution time, but also determines an optimum topology with a more favourable
boundary representation form at every iteration, without
the typical nite elements jagged-edges. The following
sections briey review the ESO methodology and the FG
formulation for elasticity problems; some examples are
presented followed by some concluding remarks.

2
ESO methodology
The concept of ESO states that by slowly removing inecient materials from a structure, a structure evolves
towards an optimum (Xie and Steven 1997). The ineciency of any portion of the material (i.e. a nite element)
is determined by low sensitivity number which is measured against the optimality objective function. For stress
based optimization, an elements von Mises stress is commonly used as the sensitivity number (Xie and Steven
1997). This is the original form of ESO where it is said
that a reliable sign of inecient material use is low stress,
and an optimum design is where, for a single load case,
every part of a structure is near a constant stress level, i.e.
a fully stressed design.
Chu (1997) derived a sensitivity number for compliance or stiness design. This compliance sensitivity number, si indicates the change in the compliance as a result
of removing element i, as dened in (1). si is also referred
to as an element contribution to the structures total compliance, and the sum of si over all elements equates to
the compliance of the structure. Removing elements with
low compliance sensitivity number minimizes the increase
in compliance as the volume is reduced, leading towards
a minimum compliance design. Note that although compliance will always increase when an element is removed
the endeavour is to minimize the specic compliance,
equivalent to maximizing the specic stiness,
si =

1
i T  i 
i 
u
K
u ,
2

(2)

where smax = maximum elemental sensitivity number

RR = rejection ratio = a0 + a1 SS ,
(Xie and Steven 1997) .

Specify design problem;

SS = 0;
Do while (optimum is not reached),
Perform FEA;
Remove elements according to (2);
If (number of removed elements = 0),
SS = SS + 1;
Evaluate RR using (3);
End if ;
End do;
Fig. 1 Summary of ESO process

3
Fixed grid for elasticity problems
A FG is generated by superimposing a rectangular grid
of equal sized elements on the given structure instead of
generating a mesh to t the structure. Some of these elements are inside the structure (I), some are outside (O)
and some are on the boundary, namely Neither-In-norOut (NIO) elements as illustrated in Fig. 2. An O element is given a material property signicantly less than an
I element, resulting in a bi-material problem.

(1)

where si = sensitivity number of element i; u = nodal displacement vector; K i = stiness matrix of element i. ESO
removes the material slowly. The slowness of the removal
is ensured by the rejection ratio. The material is removed
when the stress satises the ESO inequality, (2).
si RR smax ,

The rejection ratio increases as the structure is evolved

and its function is to delay the element removal process so
that the design does not change signicantly after each iteration. The steady state number, SS is a positive integer
counter which increases as the structure evolves. Figure 1
summarizes the ESO methodology.

(3)

Fig. 2 FG mesh

A NIO element is partially inside the structure and

its material property value is not constant nor continuous over the element. Such an element is approximated
into a homogeneous isotropic element, with its material
property dened by (4),




D(NIO)i = D(I)i ,

(4)

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i
where D(NIO)
= elemental material property of a NIO


element; D(I)i = elemental material property of element i,
= AI /Ae ,

(5)

where = area ratio; AI = area inside of the structure

within NIO element i; Ae = total area of element i.
As the sizes of all elements are identical, the stiness
matrix entries are linearly proportional to their elemental area ratio. This greatly reduces the time taken in the
stiness matrix generation and regeneration.
For FEA the preconditioned conjugate gradient solver
is implemented as it is known to be fast and ecient
(Garcia 1999; Garca and Steven 2000). In addition, the
solution vector from the previous optimization iterations
oers an excellent initial solution vector for reanalysis, reducing the solution time even further.

4
Methodology
4.1
Boundary modication
The following explanation of the method uses stress as
the optimization criterion as ESO in its original format is
stress based. However, it should be noted that replacing
stress with compliance sensitivity number of (1) achieves
compliance based optimization.
Unlike the standard ESO formation the stress along
the boundaries is considered separately from that of
a non-boundary region. The optimization algorithm
rstly examines stress on a boundary, which is determined by a linear interpolation of the two adjacent nodal
stresses. If this boundary stress is lower than the deletion
criterion, i.e. the ESO inequality of (6) is satised, the
boundary is modied to be the contour line of the deletion
criterion. Therefore stress along the modied boundary is
either equal to or higher than the deletion criterion. This
removes material with low stress of any shape and size.
Hence a boundary is no longer restricted to right angles,
but can be dened at any angle,
b < del ,

(6)

where b = stress of a boundary point; del = deletion

criterion.
After modifying all existing boundaries, stresses of the
non-boundary nodes are examined. If a non-boundary
nodal stress satises the ESO inequality of (6), the stress
values of the adjacent nodes are examined for a new
boundary, i.e. a cavity. If stress of an adjacent node does
not satisfy the ESO inequality, there exists a point between the two nodes, where its stress equates the deletion
criterion. This point is again obtained by a linear interpolation of the two nodal stresses, and becomes a boundary point. The optimization algorithm then searches for

a series of new boundary points which dene an enclosed

boundary of a low stress region. This region of material is
removed to create a cavity or a new boundary.
One iteration of optimization is completed when all
boundary and nodal stresses are examined. The area ratios of the modied elements are computed and the elemental stiness values are updated according to the area
ratios for FEA of the modied topology.
4.2
Calculation of deletion criterion
The ESOs denition of deletion criterion is a percentage
of the maximum value of the criterion. When the deletion
criterion is too small, it is increased by a pre-specied step
until the deletion criterion value is large enough to remove
elements. This sometimes requires a series of calculations
of the deletion criterion and checking all elemental criteria before the deletion criterion is nally large enough.
However, the minimum value of the criterion can be
determined and the deletion criterion can thus be computed to be always greater than the minimum criterion.
This ensures that a modication is made at every iteration and increases the eciency of ESO. Here, a new
denition of deletion criterion is proposed:
del = min + amean ,

(7)

where min = minimum value of the criteria; mean =

mean value of the criteria; a = evolutionary rate constant,
a positive real value which ensures that deletion criterion
is slightly greater than the minimum criterion value, typically 0.01 deletion criterion.
The value of the evolutionary rate constant, a denes
how much greater del is relative to min . The larger the
value of a, the more material ESO removes during an iteration and hence a faster optimization. However increasing
the rate of optimization leads to a less rened optimum
solution.
4.3
Denition of steady state
In standard ESO, a steady state is reached when no elements have criteria less than the deletion criterion. When
a topology reaches a steady state, the deletion criterion is
increased to further optimize the structure if desired.
For FG ESO, a steady state would be equivalent to
a state where no more modications are made. However,
unlike standard ESO, FG ESO allows almost innitely
small amount of material removal. A small boundary
modication still adjusts the nodal stress values, which
leads to another small modication. Therefore FG ESO
often continues to remove or add a small percentage of
material, e.g. 0.0001% of the total volume. In such cases,
it is said that a steady state is reached and a new deletion
criterion is calculated to obtain a signicant modication

444
of the topology. Thus a topology is said to have reached
a steady state if the total volume change during an iteration is less than the elemental volume, (8),
V < Velem ,

(8)

where V = volume of removed material during an iteration; Velem = volume of an element.

4.4
Merging two boundaries
As a topology is optimized and material is removed, two
separate boundaries may merge into one. FG ESO identies such a case by examining each element that contains
some boundary. When two boundaries lie on one element
as shown in Fig. 3a, the two boundaries, A and B become one boundary. The assumption here is that an area
smaller than the element width is negligible, as it would
be impractical to manufacture.
An example of Fig. 3 is used here in order to display
the boundary merge mechanism more clearly. Element
e with two boundaries A and B of Fig. 3a is enlarged
in Fig. 3b. The shaded areas represent the structure and
the clear areas represent the outside or voids. As boundaries are modied, FG ESO checks all edges of the boundary elements. When modifying element e of boundary A,
FG ESO checks for another boundary on the element
and would nd that boundary B also lies on element e.
Boundary A is then modied such that boundary B becomes a part of A, as shown in Fig. 3c. This therefore
reduces the total number of boundaries or cavities by one.

Fig. 3 Merging two boundaries

4.5
FG ESO formulation
The standard formulation of ESO removes material by
elements, where the existence of an element becomes the
design variable. However, FG ESO removes a region of
material with low stress values, and the design variable
becomes the area ratio, of each element. Therefore, the
mathematical representation of FG ESO is modied to
reect this change, (9),
n
i i i
minimize f (x) = i=1
FL
subject to V V , (min + amean) 0 .
(9)
The objective function and the nite element formulation
include i to incorporate the use of FG elements. The
second constraint represents the ESO inequality which
ensures stress in the domain is always greater than the
deletion criterion, (6).
The following step-by-step procedure gives an overview of the boundary based FG ESO algorithm and has
been summarized in Fig. 4.
1. The user is required to dene an optimization problem
by dening the maximum domain, the design environment and optimization parameters. Von Mises stress
is usually specied as the optimization criterion for
a fully stressed design, hence it will be used as the optimization criterion here. However, it should be noted
that other criteria such as compliance and frequency
sensitivity numbers could be used instead.
2. FG mesh is generated.
3. FEA is conducted to determine displacement and
stress at all nodes.
4. The minimum stress value is determined and the deletion criterion is calculated, (7).
5. Using the nodal stress values, the stress along the
boundary is examined. If the stress on a boundary
is less than the deletion criterion, a contour line of
the deletion criterion becomes the new boundary. This
boundary is obtained by a linear interpolation of two
nodal stresses.
6. The stress values of the non-boundary nodes are examined, and a new boundary, ie. a cavity along the
deletion criterion contour is initiated if it exists.
7. While modifying the boundaries, if two boundaries
pass through a single element, they merge and become
one boundary.
8. If an optimum is reached, the optimization process is
terminated.
9. Otherwise area ratios of the elements are obtained and
the new stiness matrix is generated. Another FEA is
carried out and the nodal stress values are determined.
10. If a steady state is reached according to (8), the process is repeated from step 5 to compute a new deletion
criterion. If a steady state is not reached, the process
is repeated from step 6 and continues to modify the
structure.

445
Specify design problem;
Generate FG mesh;
Generate stiness matrix;
Conduct FEA;
Evaluate the initial deletion criterion, (7);
Do while (optimum is not reached),
Modify all existing boundaries;
Initiate new boundaries;
Update stiness matrix;
Conduct FEA;
If (SS is reached),
Evaluate deletion criterion, (7);
End if ;
End do;
Fig. 4 Summary of FG ESO process

5
Examples
5.1
MBB beam
To demonstrate the method, the well-known MBB beam
(Olho et al. 1991; Zhou and Rozvany 1991) is optimized
using standard ESO with the traditional nite element
formulation and FG ESO for stress and compliance. The
design environment and the maximum domain are as
shown in Fig. 5. As only the qualitative result is of interest, the nondimensional physical parameters are chosen. Due to symmetry, only the left half of the model is
optimized with the mesh density of 75 25. For stress
based standard ESO, the evolutionary rate constants are
a1 = 0.0001 and a0 = 0.0, and for FG ESO, a = 0.006 for
stress and a = 0.003 for compliance. The computer used
for all problems presented in this paper is a Pentium
133 MHz with 32 MB RAM.
The optimum solutions from standard ESO; stress
based FG ESO; compliance based FG ESO are selected
at an equivalent volume level for comparison and they are
displayed in Fig. 6, together with the known optimal grillage layout.
Similar truss-like topologies are obtained for all cases:
The locations and angles of the members as well as the
general topology of the solutions compare closely. They
also agree favourably with the exact analytical (Fig. 6d,
after Lewi
nski et al. 1994) optimal layout and with dis-

Fig. 6 Optimum solutions of MBB beam problem. (a) Standard ESO solution, (b) stress based FG ESO solution, (c)
compliance based FG ESO solution, and (d) exact analytical
optimal truss layout (Lewi
nski et al. 1994)

cretized solutions by other researchers (Zhou and Rozvany 1991; Olho et al. 1991; Hassani and Hinton 1998;
Sigmund 1994).
Table 1 presents the details of the solutions. The advantage of using FG can easily be viewed by comparing
the solutions time, where the FG ESO solution times are
signicantly lower than that of standard ESO: For stress
optimization, using FG reduced the solution time by 87%.
The mean to maximum stress ratio is an indication of
the even stress distribution, and as a topology is optimized, the stress ratio is expected to rise. The relative
mean to maximum stress in Table 1 is measured relative
to its initial value. Both standard ESO and FG ESO solutions display approximately 20% increase in the relative
Table 1 Comparison of MBB beam optimization

ESO

Fig. 5 MBB beam design problem

volume (%)
solution time
relative mean/max
stress ratio
maximum
displacement

Standard
FG ESO

Stress
FG ESO

Compliance

65
13:06:24
1.22

65
1:41:49
1.23

61
1:25:04

41.6

41.8

446
mean to maximum stress ratio values, again indicating
the equivalence of the two solutions.
As mentioned earlier, stress based and compliance
based FG ESO both produced similar solutions. Some
dierences in their internal structural member arrangements in Fig. 6b and c are primarily due to stress approximation. However the equivalence of these solutions
is demonstrated clearly in their maximum displacement
values in Table 1. This is in agreement with Li et al.
(1999) and Rozvany and K
arolyi (1999)s nding, where
an optimal stress design is equivalent to a compliance design for single load case problems.

5.2
Michells beam design
A typical Michell type problem (Michell 1904) has been
optimized. The design environment and the maximum
domain are as shown in Fig. 7. Due to symmetry, only the
left half of the model is optimized and the mesh size of
50 50 is used. For standard ESO, the evolutionary rate
constants are a1 = 0.0001 and a0 = 0.0; a = 0.04 for stress
FG ESO; and a = 0.008 for compliance FG ESO.
The optimal solutions for all three optimization are
obtained at around 40% volume level as shown in Fig. 8.
Again, the expected topology of a truss-like structure
(Michell 1904) is observed for all cases. The standard
stress based ESO solution of Fig. 8a is obtained after
22 hours 55 minutes and 30 seconds whilst stress based
FG ESO obtained its solution of Fig. 8b in 2 hours and
22 minutes and 52 seconds, which is almost 90% reduction in time. The compliance FG ESO solution of Fig. 8c
required 50 minutes and 40 seconds.
However, three cavities are created in the topology by
standard ESO while 5 cavities are created in FG ESOs
topology. This demonstrates the benets of the boundary based optimization where a part of an element may be
removed according to the stress patterns. This not only
gains a boundary representation of the solution, it leads
to a more rened and detailed topology, indicated by the
increased number of cavities.
A greater number of cavities can be obtained by increasing the mesh density and/or reducing the evolution-

Fig. 7 Michells design problem of beam AR2

Fig. 8 Optimum solutions of Michells beam problem

ary rate (Kim et al. 2000b). It can therefore be understood that applying standard ESO with a reduced evolutionary rate may gain a more comparable topology with
the same number of cavities. ESO is applied again to
the same problem with the same sized mesh but with
a slower rate of a1 = 1 105 . After 982 iterations and
24 hours 6 minutes and 24 seconds, the same topology
with three cavities of Fig. 8a is obtained again. Therefore, it is induced that an even slower evolutionary rate
and a ner mesh density must be applied in order to obtain a topology with 5 cavities by standard ESO. This
will increase the solution time even further. Thus, the
benets of using FG ESO can be appreciated from this
illustration.
The layout of the stress and compliance solutions
of Fig. 8b and c, again compare closely, but with dierence number of cavities. This is due to the stress approximation procedure, where a nodal stress is approximated
by a volume weighted average of the von Mises stresses
at the Gauss points of 4 surrounding elements. This introduces a smoothing eect on the stress distribution,
similar to the patch smoothing technique (Li et al. 1999),
thus reducing the number of cavities (Kim 2000). Therefore, a smaller number of cavities may be obtained in

447
stress based solutions. However, the layout of both solutions display the features of the optimal arrangement
determined by Michell (1904), albeit his work related to
pin-jointed frame and not continua.

5.3
Bridge
A simple bridge model is optimized for compliance. The
design environment is as shown in Fig. 9. A deck of 4 unit
thickness is placed on the top and is specied as the nondesign domain. A uniformly distributed load is applied
on the top deck to simulate trac. Applying a symmetry
condition, only half of the design domain is modelled with
a mesh density of 50 30. An evolutionary rate constant
of a = 0.01 is applied.
A continuous optimum of an arch-like support, Fig. 10a
is reached at 55% volume and the stiness sensitivity

Fig. 9 Bridge design problem

Fig. 10 Optimum topologies with uniformly distributed load

Fig. 11 Optimum topology with a point load

values of the boundary are uniform. Thus, applying FG

ESO creates the cavities in order to reduce the volume
further and this leads to a discrete optimum at 27% volume of Fig. 10b.
Stiness FG ESO is also applied to the same design
domain subjected to a point load at the centre of the
top deck, instead of the uniformly distributed load, and
its solution is displayed in Fig. 11. Due to the nature of
the applied load, two diagonal members transmitting the
load from its point of application to the xed supports are
obtained as the optimum conguration, at the volume of
32% relative to its initial design domain.

6
Conclusions
This paper has presented the FG ESO algorithm which
removes material along the contour line of the deletion
criterion. In contrast to element based ESO with its element by element removal, FG ESO removes material in any
form. The denition of the deletion criterion is modied
so that it always removes a small percentage of materials,
which again increases the eciency of the optimization
algorithm.
In some structural designs, a large deection is not
favourable and compliance becomes an important consideration. FG ESO was thus extended to compliance based
optimization. When applied to single-load problems, the
solutions were comparable to the stress based optimization results. This conrms that the compliance design is
equivalent to a fully stressed design (Li et al. 1999; Rozvany and K
arolyi 1999).
The jagged-edges which are a prominent feature of
standard ESO topologies are not observed in the FG ESO
topologies, however their boundaries of the solutions presented in the paper are not perfectly smooth. It should
be noted that these solutions are depicted by a series of
points, simply connected by straight lines. Another factor contributing to the nonsmooth boundaries is the use
of linear interpolation in the determination of boundary
stresses. However, as the purpose of this study is to appreciate the solution time reduction and the feasibility
of the optimization method, the proposed algorithm is
deemed adequate to show the eciency and eectiveness
of boundary based FG ESO. Since the output format of
the FG ESO results is the boundary points arranged in
the anticlockwise manner, a more sophisticated image ltering technique can be applied to the output in order
to obtain smooth boundaries. Equivalently a higher order
interpolation of the nodal stresses may be applied to better approximate the boundary stress, leading to smooth
boundaries.
The examples demonstrate that FG ESO is able to
produce an optimal topology in agreement with the
known solutions. The topologies are not represented by
the nite elements jagged-edges but by a series of
boundary points arranged in the anticlockwise direc-

448
tion, and such an output of a topology is produced at
every iteration. This greatly simplies further analysis or
further design manipulation or the preparation for manufacturing. However the most signicant advantage is the
reduction of solution time.

ber of cavities. In: CD-Rom Proc. 8-th AIAA/NASA/USAF/

ISSMO Symp. on Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization (held in Long Beach, CA, USA)

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