Topological Insulators by Topology Optimization

An acoustic topological insulator (TI) is synthesized using topology optimization, a free material inverse design method. The TI appears spontaneously from the optimization process without imposing requirements on the existence of pseudo spin-1/2 states at the TI interface edge, or the Chern number of the topological phases. The resulting TI is passive; consisting of acoustically hard members placed in an air background and has an operational bandwidth of $\approx$12.5\% showing high transmission. Further analysis demonstrates confinement of more than 99\% of the total field intensity in the TI within at most six lattice constants from the TI interface. The proposed design hereby outperforms a reference from recent literature regarding energy transmission, field confinement and operational bandwidth.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Toplogical derivative for nonlinear magnetostatic problem

The topological derivative represents the sensitivity of a domain-dependent functional with respect to a local perturbation of the domain and is a valuable tool in topology optimization. Motivated by an application from electrical engineering, we derive the topological derivative for an optimization problem which is constrained by the quasilinear equation of two-dimensional magnetostatics. Here, the main ingredient is to establish a sufficiently fast decay of the variation of the direct state at scale 1 as $|x|\rightarrow \infty$. In order to apply the method in a bi-directional topology optimization algorithm, we derive both the sensitivity for introducing air inside ferromagnetic material and the sensitivity for introducing material inside an air region. We explicitly compute the arising polarization matrices and introduce a way to efficiently evaluate the obtained formulas. Finally, we employ the derived formulas in a level-set based topology optimization algorithm and apply it to the design optimization of an electric motor.Comment: 54 pages, 9 figure