# A Comparative Study of the Application of Different Commercial Software for Topology Optimization
## 3 Different TO Software Platforms  
At this point, a thorough literature search was conducted for the identification of the available software that can be used for the implementation of SO with a special focus on TO. The result of this research was the creation of a library in a table form that contains 70 different TO software platforms. This library encompasses the name, company, availability (commercial/open source), the optimization type (size, shape, topology), and methods ((parametric (P)/non-parametric (NP), TO (SIMP, RAMP, level set), lattice)) that the software uses, as well as the objective functions and constraints of TO. The constraints are categorized based on the four clusters of the CAD designers' input presented in Section 1. In addition, it is shortly described how TO results are presented in the software's interface. Furthermore, relative references and representative literature for each software platform are included, if they are available. Table 1 presents a section of the developed TO library. In this table, only the software platforms used in the comparative study presented later in this paper are included, which are SolidWorks, ANSYS Mechanical, and ABAQUS. Interested readers can access and edit the library online at the following links: [[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1) CnQOA492 EkCdX1 gi59 EWaPnrJBL-fQQs/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110678641076107916949&rtpf=true&sd=true]([https://docs.google.com/document/d/1](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1) CnQOA492 EkCdX1 gi59 EWaPnrJBL-fQQs/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110678641076107916949&rtpf=true&sd=true) (accessed on 15 December 2021) or Supplementary Material [13; 15; 16; 22; 23; 24; 26; 27; 28; 38; 39; 40; 41; 42; 43; 44; 45; 46; 47; 48; 49; 40; 42; 44; 45; 46; 47; 48; 49; 41; 43; 45; 47; 49; 48; 49; 42; 49; 43; 45; 46; 47; 48; 49; 49; 50; 51; 52; 53; 54; 55; 56; 57; 58; 59; 60; 61; 62; 63; 64; 65; 66; 67; 68; 69; 70; 71; 72; 73; 74; 75; 76; 77; 78; 79; 80; 81; 82; 83; 84;  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Name** & **Avalability** & **Optimization Type** & **Objective Functions** & **Constraints** & **Results** & **Results** \\
**(Company Version)** & **Availability** & **Method** & **(TO)** & **(TO)** & **(TO)** & **(TO)** & **Representative Literature** \\ \hline \multirow{4}{*}{Solidwords, 3 DS [23]} & \multirow{4}{*}{ \begin{tabular}{c} Commercial/Available at \\ student edition \\ \end{tabular}  } & \multirow{4}{*}{ \begin{tabular}{c} Size. P \\ Shape. P \\ Topology. TO (GMP). \\ \end{tabular}  } & \multirow{4}{*}{\ \begin{tabular}{c} Design: dimensions, mass \\ Suppers and connections. futures, \\ contacts, delay/connected, frequency \\ Locales structural loads, stress, FOS \\ Manufacturing property regard, \\ member size, indol (pull direction), \\ symmetry (platform) \\ \end{tabular}  } & \multirow{4}{*}{
\begin{tabular}{c} Optimized design: faceted \\ geometry \\ Radius. element density \\ Radius. The compliance/stiffness/strain energy is the most common objective function. However, some software platforms, such as ABAQUS and Altair Optistruct, offer a plethora of objective functions. Another category that differentiates the SO software is the manufacturing constraints. A gradual increase in the manufacturing constraints in software shows the trend in the companies of focusing on the post-processing of the results by bridging the optimized designs with the manufacturing methods and CAM. Furthermore, the majority of the software allows the user to create a plot of the distribution of the elements' density, while some generate stress, strain, and displacement plots of the optimized models. However, based on the authors' experience, these results are only some estimations and not the actual values. Only numerical validations can offer a good approximation of the stresses, strains, and displacements of the structures found through experiments.