Open-Source Codes of Topology Optimization: A Summary for Beginners to Start Their Research

Topology optimization (TO), a numerical technique to find the optimal material layout with a given design domain, has attracted interest from researchers in the field of structural optimization in recent years. For beginners, open source codes are undoubtedly the best alternative to learning TO, which can elaborate the implementation of a method in detail and easily engage more people to employ and extend the method. In this paper, we present a summary of various open-source codes and related literature on TO methods, including solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP), evolutionary method, level set method (LSM), moving morphable components/voids (MMC/MMV) methods, multiscale topology optimization method, etc. Simultaneously, we classify the codes into five levels, from easy to difficult, depending on their difficulty, so that beginners can get started and understand the form of code implementation more quickly.