Spring 2022 – Topology optimization of engineering systems

Forewords

Some of the libraries below will not work on a Windows environment, sorry. If you have no other options than using Windows, I recommend that you work on a virtual machine (see e.g. VirtualBox for a tutorial which should give you a working environment). On Mac, it should work (some packages might need to be installed with brew).

Instructions for installing the nullspace-optimizer optimization library

You will need a working python3.6+ environment on your machine. I recommend the installation of anaconda:

Download the latest version here
Run the installer, e.g.

sh Anaconda3-2021.11-Linux-x86_64.sh

At the end of the installation (if this is your first installation of python), I recommend that you say no to the question

Do you wish the installer to initialize Anaconda3 by running conda init?

Instead, add anaconda3/bin (or the directory in which Anaconda3 is installed) to your ~/.bashrc:

export PATH="~/anaconda3/bin/:$PATH"

Upon a successful installation, you should be able to run python code using spyder, running jupyter notebooks and to open a python shell:

 $ which python
~/anaconda3/bin/python

 $ python
Python 3.8.10 (default, May  4 2021, 00:00:00) 
[GCC 10.2.1 20201125 (Red Hat 10.2.1-9)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Use CTRL+D to exit the python console.

Then, open a shell (or the anaconda prompt if you are using windows) and run

 $ pip install nullspace_optimizer[osqp,colored,matplotlib]

This should install the nullspace_optimizer package on your machine. You can check the installation is successful by running an example, e.g.

 $ python -m nullspace_optimizer.examples.ex1

See https://gitlab.com/florian.feppon/null-space-optimizer for a complete documentation of the package.

Then, run the homework .ipynb files by running

 $ jupyter notebook

in the directory in which they are located.

Pymedit and Pyfreefem

We will also use the libraries pymedit and pyfreefem during the course to manipulate meshes and to interact with FreeFEM (see this page). You can install them easily by running

pip install pymedit
pip install pyfreefem