At the beginning of the conventional design process, the design
engineer often defines the shape and the topology of new components
using the experience and the results gained from existing designs. This
results in an evolution process that might lead to an optimum design
after several manual design iterations and a long process development
time. Nowadays it is necessary to shorten the development process of
new components, and at the same time develop fundamentally new designs.
Therefore, optimization tools are necessary for replacing the natural
evolution process by an automatic procedure. With SIMULIA Tosca Structure,
it is possible to carry out topology and shape optimization in the existing
CAE environment.
Topology optimization is a tool to generate a new design proposal
and is often used within the concept phase for determining a new conceptual
design for a component.