Wednesday 29 May 2013

WCSMO-10 is over

WCSMO-10 is over, and again I realized, that the WCSMO is by far the most interesting conference for me. The whole numerical topology optmization community was there and I enjoyed it very much. I have the impression that I meanwhile know a lot of the important people (at least a little :)).


I held a talk on piezoelectric free material optimization, similar to what I talked about on the last Workshop on Direct and Inverse Problems in Piezoelectricity, but this time not starting with the music of Jean Michel Jarre :)

People liked our tensor stiffness visualization, maybe I should put the Python code online ...

I also had a poster at the poster session about self-penalization. The content is from a former talk and can be also found in my thesis. My impression is, that private and direct communication/ discussion is best for the topic. The poster can also be downloaded.




This time Jamie Guest was almost omnipresent with a very large group. He appeared on 13 talks as (co-)author compared to 8 talks (co-)authored by Ole Sigmund. Well, numbers are one thing but it's impressive.

My favorite talk was by Alexander Verbart from the group of Fred van Keulen; A new approach for stress-based topology optimization: internal stress penalization. I did a little on stress optimization (e.g. piezoelectric stress optimization) but for me there are two open problems: have not grayness to confirm to the constraints and the miracle of the min vol problem which would be best for rho = rho_min. The idea of Alexander has neither stress penalization nor globalization parameters, subregions or anything else. The approach would allow gray material to confirm with the stresses but with some luck the optimizer won't find this solution. I'll have to give it a try.