A comparative study of dynamic analysis methods for structural topology optimization under harmonic force excitations

This work is focused on the topology optimization related to harmonic responses for large-scale problems. A comparative study is made among mode displacement method (MDM), mode acceleration method (MAM) and full method (FM) to highlight their effectiveness. It is found that the MDM results in the unsatisfactory convergence due to the low accuracy of harmonic responses, while MAM and FM have a good accuracy and evidently favor the optimization convergence. Especially, the FM is of superiority in both accuracy and efficiency under the excitation at one specific frequency; MAM is preferable due to its balance between the computing efficiency and accuracy when multiple excitation frequencies are taken into account.