Thesis published

Finished! :)

On the 19th of December 2011 I had the defence of my thesis (Dr. Ing.).



I published my thesis online. You can access it at UB Erlangen-Nuermberg.

The thesis

Topology Optimization of Smart Piezoelectric Transducers

has three main topics:

• topology optimization of a piezoelectric loupspeaker
• topology optimization of a piezoelectric cantilevered energy harvester
• self-penalization in topology optimization

Thank's a lot to my colleagues for the great hat!! :)

I will continue as PostDoc at my current position, working for Prof. Stingl at the chair of applied mathematics from Prof. Leugering.

Interactive Self-Penalization

I added mechanism design to our iTop tool, see also my last post. This allows to play with the force inverter problem. Volume constraint bounds can be switched, regularization can be disabled by setting "reg. value" to one. It makes sense to play with "start optimization from current design". Local solutions are really a problem. Sometimes it helps to play with the physical lower bound (rho^p) and penalization values.

Clearly, the results are not necessarily more "desirable" than the volume constraint results. But IMHO this is not the point. Here not the practical relevance of the result is interesting but the strong self-penalizing effect.

BTW, I finished my PhD! :) More to write about this next week when I officially publish my thesis (online).