Fluidic Topology Optimization with an Anisotropic Mixture Model

Abstract: Fluidic devices are crucial components in many industrial applications involving fluid mechanics. Computational design of a high-performance fluidic system faces multifaceted challenges regarding its geometric representation and physical accuracy. We present a novel topology optimization method to design fluidic devices in a Stokes flow context. Our approach is featured by its capability in accommodating a broad spectrum of boundary conditions at the solid-fluid interface. Our key contribution is an anisotropic and differentiable constitutive model that unifies the representation of different phases and boundary conditions in a Stokes model, enabling a topology optimization method that can synthesize novel structures with accurate boundary conditions from a background grid discretization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by conducting several fluidic system design tasks with over four million design parameters.