6. Concluding remarks
In the present paper, a novel approach for explicit and local control of both minimum/maximum length scales in topology optimization of continuum structures is proposed. Our method is established based on the concept of structural skeleton, which has been well addressed in the field of image processing. Once the structural skeleton is identified, the minimum/maximum length scales can be measured accurately, which is the basis to formulate the corresponding functions in a mathematical rigorous way. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed approach does have the capability to give a complete control of the length scales of structural features in an explicit and local way. Although mainly structural optimization problems are considered in the present paper, the same idea and the corresponding implementation techniques can also be applied to other multi-disciplinary topology optimization problems. Research results along these directions will be reported elsewhere.
