A study on ranked bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization (R-BESO) method for fully stressed structure design based on displacement sensitivity

Abstract

Evolutionary Structural Optimization (ESO) method is well known as one of several topology optimization methods and has been applied to a lot of optimization problems. While ESO method evolves the given model into an optimum by subtracting several elements, in AESO method elements are added in a previous step of the evolutionary procedure. And in BESO (Bidirectional ESO) method, some elements are either generated or eliminated from a previous model of evolutionary procedure. In this paper, Ranked Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural Optimization (R-BESO) method is introduced as one of the topology optimization methods using an evolutionary algorithm and is applied to several optimization problems. The method can get optimum topologies of the structures throughout fewer iterations comparing with previous several methods based on ESO. R-BESO method is similar to BESO method except that elements are generated near a candidate element according to the rank calculated by sensitivity analyses. The displacement sensitivity analysis was adopted by the nodal displacements of a candidate element in order to determine a rank on the free edges for two dimensional model or the free surfaces for three dimensional model. In this paper, R-BESO method is proposed as another useful design tool like the previous ESO and BESO method for the two bar frame problem, the Michell type structure problem and the three dimension short cantilever beam problem, which had been used to verify reasonability of ESO method family. For the three dimensions short cantilever beam problem an optimized topology could be obtained with much fewer iterations with respect to the results of other ESO methods.