Minimum Weight Design of Structural Topologies

Abstract

A design procedure for optimizing structural topologies is presented. The member sizes are the design variables and the constraints are related to stresses, displacements, and bounds on the variables. The proposed procedure is intended to overcome some basic difficulties involved in the solution process. A near optimal solution is achieved by solving sequentially several simple subproblems. A main feature of this approach is that the exact analysis of the structure need not be repeated many times during the solution process. The effectiveness of the proposed solution procedure is demonstrated by several examples. It is shown that optimal topologies are significantly better than nonoptimal ones.