Sensitivity of a general class of shape functionals to topological changes

The topological derivative represents the first term of the asymptotic expansion of a given shape functional with respect to the small parameter which measures the size of singular domain perturbations. The topological derivative has been successfully applied in the treatment of problems such as topology optimization, inverse analysis and image processing. In this paper, the calculation of the topological derivative for a general class of shape functionals is presented. In particular, we evaluate the topological derivative of a modified energy shape functional associated to the steady-state heat conduction problem, considering the nucleation of a small circular inclusion as the topological perturbation. Several methods were proposed to calculate the topological derivative. In this paper, the so-called topological-shape sensitivity method is extended to deal with a modified adjoint method, leading to an alternative approach to calculate the topological derivative based on shape sensitivity analysis together with a modified Lagrangian method. Since we are dealing with a general class of shape functionals, which are not necessarily associated to the energy, we will show that this new approach simplifies the most delicate step of the topological derivative calculation, namely, the asymptotic analysis of the adjoint state.