Author(s)

W.H. Zhang, P. Beckers, P. Duysinx & C. Fleury

Abstract

A parametric design based approach to structural shape optimization W.-H. Zhang, P. Beckers, P. Duysinx, C. Fleury Aerospace Laboratory, LTAS, University of Liege, B-4000, Belgium ABSTRACT In recent years, the integration of structural optimization methods with the modern CAD technology has made remarkable progress to achieve automatic engineering designs. The objective of this paper is to introduce the practical design methodology in structural shape optimization. A general parametric design based approacn is developed and fully discussed here. Based on the CAD geometric model of the structure, shape design variables can be either manually or automatically identified with the help of equality constraints. Because the chosen design variables are reduced to a minimum number and are independent of each other, the original shape optimization problem is simplified into a compact form without equality constraints. Finally, the problem can be suitably solved

Keywords