Periodic structures stiffness topology optimization

Resumo

Stiffness topology optimization aims to determine the best material arrangement, capable of conciliating high structural stiffness and low weight, which handles certain loading conditions subjected to predefined boundary conditions. The imposed periodic constrain is fundamented on the fact that structures made of periodic materials behave as a homogeneous continuum, because the macro-structure cells are modeled as a uniform medium composed by periodic material. The optimization algorithm used in this work is the BESO (Bi-directional Evolutionary Structural Optimization), which analyzes the structure, under its loadings and boundary conditions, and generates the optimum topology through addition and removal of material. However, in order to reduce the high computational costs of this method when applied to very refined meshes, which is the case with most periodic structures, emphasis was placed on the integration between Matlab and Ansys softwares, with promising results.