Implementation of a Plug-and-Play Reusable Level-Set Topology Optimization Framework via COMSOL Multiphysics

This work is aimed at developing a workflow to use state-of-the-art level-set topology optimization (LSTO) methods with COMSOL Multiphysics. The graphical user interface (GUI) and solver of COMSOL Multiphysics are used to simplify the implementation of the considered physics problem. A physics model file (.m file) is then extracted from COMSOL Multiphysics, which can be called from and adjusted in MATLAB to make an interface with the level-set module. The LSTO modules written in C++ are imported into MATLAB to interface with the physics model extracted from COMSOL Multiphysics. The element sensitivities are computed in COMSOL Multiphysics and combined with the boundary perturbation method to calculate the boundary point (or shape) sensitivities using the discrete adjoint method. The capabilities of the proposed workflow are demonstrated with numerical examples. The proposed workflow alleviates the difficulty of implementing LSTO, especially in the case of coupled multiphysics problems.