Second order topological sensitivity analysis

Abstract The topological derivative provides the sensitivity of a given cost function with respect to the insertion of a hole at an arbitrary point of the domain. Classically, this derivative comes from the second term of the topological asymptotic expansion, dealing only with infinitesimal holes. However, for practical applications, we need to insert holes of finite size. Therefore, we consider one more term in the expansion which is defined as the second order topological derivative. In order to present these ideas, in this work we apply the topological-shape sensitivity method as a systematic approach to calculate first as well as second order topological derivative for the Poisson’s equations, taking the total potential energy as cost function and the state equation as constraint. Furthermore, we also study the effects of different boundary conditions on the hole: Neumann and Dirichlet (both homogeneous). Finally, we present some numerical experiments showing the influence of the second order topological derivative in the topological asymptotic expansion, which has two main features: it allows us to deal with hole of finite size and provides a better descent direction in optimization process.