On how to avoid the formation of hinges in compliant mechanisms using connectivity constraints

This paper presents a new method for avoiding the formation of hinges in topology-optimized compliant mechanisms. As the presence of hinges weakens and even may ultimately favor the disconnection of the device, we opt for using a connectivity constraint already introduced by the authors in previous works (Donoso et al. in Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 393:114769, 2022; in Comput Struct 275:106936, 2023a) that has proven to be satisfactory to succeed in the above task. Two classical benchmarks in this field, namely the inverter and the gripper, are simulated to numerically corroborate our density-based approach.