Event Information:

• Thu

  12

  Feb

  2026

  SC Seminar: Mohammad Rabieh

  11:00Hybrid (Room 32-349 and via Zoom)

  Mohammad Rabieh, RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau

  Title: The Evolution of Topology Optimization Algorithms: From the 99-Line Code to Taichi-TopOpt

  Abstract:

  Finding optimal material distributions within a design domain is a fundamental challenge instructural engineering, with topology optimization representing its most powerful paradigm. As stated by Bendsøe and Kikuchi in their seminal 1988 paper, topology optimization enables the discovery of optimal structural topologies without any a priori assumptions about the layout. This report traces the evolution of topology optimization from the mathematically rigorous but computationally complex homogenization method (1988), through the density-based SIMP method that enabled practical implementations, to Sigmund’s landmark 99-line MATLAB code (2001) that has been downloaded over 13,000 times and cited over 2,000 times. I analyzed how his educational code evolved through the 88-line version by Andreassen et al. (2011) with 100×speedup, and the recent top99neo (2020) achieving further 5.5×improvements. The report then examines the Taichi-TopOpt framework by Li (2021), which leverages the Taichi programming language for GPU acceleration while maintaining Python’s accessibility. By implementing both SIMP and BESO methods, I discovered critical stability issues in naive BESO implementations and developed robust solutions. My experiments demonstrate that proper parameter tuning evolutionary ratio, lter radius, minimum density) is essential for convergence, achieving compliance values of c≈204 (SIMP) and c≈189 (BESO) for the standard MBB beam benchmark.

  How to join online

  You can join online via Zoom, using the following link:
  https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/69269239534?pwd=Z9UOzMpkhMjrxVhll3d49sNHFe9Fd1.1