Abstract: The moving morphable components method has the advantages of less design variables and explicit expression of structural geometric parameters, and has become a topology optimization method widely used in the design of engineering structures. In this paper, the influence of the initial number of components in the movable morphable component method on topology optimization is studied. Based on the moving morphable component framework, the finite element analysis and sensitivity analysis are used to solve the structural field of the design domain. The moving asymptote method is used as the optimization method to update the design variables. The volume is used as the constraint function and the structural flexibility is the minimum objective function. The influence of the number of different components on the topology optimization results of the short beam examples under specific stress conditions is studied. The results show that as the number of components increases from 6 to 20, the objective function value decreases correspondingly, the topology contour is smoother and the details are more prominent; however, the complexity of the topology optimization structure increases correspondingly, and the optimization takes time. Research can provide a useful reference for the reasonable selection of components in actual topology optimization.