It is well known that material distribution topology optimization problems often are ill-posed if no restriction or regularization method is used. A drawback with the standard linear density filter is that the resulting designs have large areas of intermediate densities, so-called gray areas, especially when large filter radii are used. To produce final designs with less gray areas, several different methods have been proposed; for example, projecting the densities after the filtering or using a nonlinear filtering procedure. In a recent paper, we presented a framework that encompasses a vast majority of currently available density filters. In this paper, we show that all these nonlinear filters ensure existence of solutions to a continuous version of the minimal compliance problem. In addition, we provide a detailed description on how to efficiently compute sensitivities for the case when multiple of these nonlinear filters are applied in sequence. Finally, we present a numerical experiment that illustrates that these cascaded nonlinear filters can be used to obtain independent size control of both void and material regions in a large-scale setting.