THE TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION IN THE PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS

The design process represents, already for a long time now, a very interesting research field for the scientific community that has tried, through its own activity of research and development, to make it faster, more reliable and efficient. Thanks to this continuous development, during the last years, the product design process has suffered a remarkable improvement, both regarding the methodological aspect, become mostly structured, objective and rational, and as regards the helping tools for the design like, for example, the software CAD, FEM, CFD, that have been improved in their efficiency and functionality. In this context, the development of more and more reliable and simple to use methods of topology and shape optimization represents, nowadays, one of the most remarkable contributions to the improvement of the design process. In this paper some of the main topology optimization methodologies, to use in the industrial design field, are introduced. The main objective is introducing, also through the description of some application examples, a complete review, critically analyzed, about the different techniques of topology optimization