This is very similar to topopt from Ole Sigmund's group. While topopt demonstrates the possibilities of topology optimization (including mechanism design and 3D compliance), we somehow have a more educational focus.
With out interactive topology optimization (iTop) you can play with the regularization and optimizer. Furthermore we include 2D material design where e.g. auxetic material (negative Poisson's ratio) can be designed.
A good example is SNOPT as optimizer with slope constraints as regularization. Both are rather slow for compliance problems but for very challenging material design problems this might be the only possible choice.
What I often show is the non-convex property of penalized compliance. Enable "start optimization from current design" and "restart new optimization on parameter change".
For sufficient penalization, moving the force point might result in a clearly poor local solution. Now taking away the penalization (switch to 1) and activate it again (e.g. 3) the "global optimal" solution is found.
For several parameter sets optimization might fail. By this we want to demonstrate, that optimization is not a black-box problem!
The documentation and all the references are still missing, therefore we do not link to iTop officially from our chair's web page. We hope we can provide some documentation soon.
While being based on our optimization software, iTop is a demonstrator tool only. This is not necessarily the kind of problems we solve in our academic work. iTop contains just a small selection of our tools.
Enjoy and ask if you have any questions.
