<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in"><i>Rapid advances in additive manufacturing and topology optimization enable unprecedented levels of design freedom for realizing complex structures.&nbsp; The challenge is that the increasing design freedom is accompanied by increasing complexity, such that it can become difficult for either computational algorithms or human designers alone to search these expansive design spaces effectively.&nbsp; Our goal is to establish an interactive design framework that is both data-driven and designer-guided so that human designers can work together with computational algorithms to search structural design spaces more effectively.&nbsp; The framework builds upon classical topology optimization techniques to build a library of designs for a class of problem.&nbsp; A conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) is trained to establish a latent representation of the library and to support rapid exploration of candidate designs. The library of designs is clustered based on visual similarity.&nbsp; The user selects clusters with desirable features, and the underlying latent representation is manipulated to generate visually similar candidate designs with adjustable levels of diversity or similarity to the selected clusters.&nbsp; The framework enables designers to use their expertise and intuition to screen designs quickly, eliminate clusters of designs that are obviously unsuitable (for reasons such as aesthetics or secondary functionality that could be difficult to incorporate into the topology optimization process itself), and guide the algorithm towards promising solutions.</i></p>

A Framework for Interactive Structural Design Exploration

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.