Revisiting p-refinement in structural topology optimization

The results obtained in traditional topology optimization with a single density design variable assigned to each element, are typically improved through h-refinement where the resolution of the FE mesh is scaled up along with the number of density elements/voxels, without increasing the order of the finite element interpolation. Higher order elements allow a more realistic simulation of the physics without some of the spurious results associated with lower order elements, including improved numerical instability as a tertiary advantage. In this work, we conduct a detailed investigation of p-refinement in the context of SIMP topology optimization including optimized topologies, compliance values and CPU clock time, for various 2D classical benchmark problems.