Minimum Weight Design of Thin-Walled Structures Modeled by Shell Finite Elements

Dejan Malobabić

This work deals with optimal design of thin-plate type structures. There are essentially two motivating factors for developing structural optimization capabilities. The more obvious of the two is to increase the productivity of a structural designer by automating for him the otherwise tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming manual design changes towards a design that is often only satisfactory, but not necessarily optimal. This work considers minimum weight design of structural components modeled by finite elements. To solve an optimization problem, optimality criteria methods [1-3] are used. The potential strength of the method is that the number of iterations needed to converge to an optimum is virtually independent of the number of structural members [2]. This property makes this method well suited for the optimum sizing of large practical structures. In order to illustrate the efficiency of this optimization procedure, minimum weight design of aircraft structural components is analyzed.

Key words: thin-walled structures, thin-walled shells, optimal design, minimum weight design, finite elements method.

FUL TEXT

Scientific Technical Review ,-   3-4, 2008