Ansys Discovery vs ARL Topologies

Ansys Discovery has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

ARL Topologies is free, open-source software for topology optimization, published by USArmyResearchLab as a United States government project. It is intended for research and general use, and runs self-hosted from the command line with an XML input file. The program separates design representation, optimization method, and objective function. Representations include two- and three-dimensional element-based density discretization with SIMP interpolation, plus nodal-based density discretization with Heaviside projection and filtering. Inputs can be ASCII ExodusII or GMSH meshes, or rectangular pixel and voxel regions. Available optimizers include optimality criterion, method of moving asymptotes, BFGS through NLopt, and a genetic algorithm. Its implemented objective performs static structural finite element analysis. Density results can be post-processed to STL, while VTK, GMSH, and Matlab are output formats. A shared-library objective function allows extension to other problems. Building requires a C++11 compiler and listed libraries.