Abstract

Abstract

This work analyzes the influence of the discretization error associated with the finite element (FE) analyses of each design configuration proposed by the structural shape optimization algorithms over the behavior of the algorithm. The paper clearly shows that if FE analyses are not accurate enough, the final solution provided by the optimization algorithm will neither be optimal nor satisfy the constraints. The need for the use of adaptive FE analysis techniques in shape optimum design will be shown. The paper proposes the combination of two strategies to reduce the computational cost related to the use of mesh adaptivity in evolutionary optimization algorithms: (a) the use of an algorithm for the mesh generation by projection of the discretization error, which reduces the computational cost associated with the adaptive FE analysis of each geometrical configuration and (b) the successive increase of the required accuracy of the FE analyses in order to obtain a considerable reduction of the computational cost in the early stages of the optimization process.

Abstract

Evolutionary methods are a powerful and robust tool for the solution of structural shape optimization problems. Nevertheless, the use of these methods requires the structural analysis of an important number of different designs, this making the computational cost of the analysis of each design a critical issue. For this reason, each design must be analyzed at a minimum computational cost but ensuring a minimum quality of the results.

It is well known that the cheapest mesh for producing a solution with a fixed quality at minimum cost is an adapted one. Nevertheless, traditional adapted meshes are obtained from adaptive remeshing strategies, where each design has to be analyzed more than once, thereby also causing a high computational cost.

This work presents a new strategy that allows generating an adapted mesh for each design without the necessity of performing a full adaptive remeshing procedure for each of them. It is based on the use of sensitivity analysis of all magnitudes related with adaptive remeshing (location of nodes, error estimation, etc.) with respect to the design variables. This sensitivity analysis is performed only once using a geometry of reference and it is used to project the results of the corresponding analysis to all other designs to be analyzed. The projected information allows generating an appropriate adapted mesh for each new design in one shot, greatly reducing the computational cost compared with standard strategies.

Abstract

This work analyzes the influence of the discretization error contained in the Finite Element (FE) analyses of each design configuration proposed by structural shape optimization algorithms over the behaviour of the algorithm. If the FE analyses are not accurate enough, the final solution will neither be optimal nor satisfy the constraints. The need for the use of adaptive FE analysis techniques in shape optimum design will be shown. The paper also proposes the use of the algorithm described in [1] in order to reduce the computational cost associated to the adaptive FE analysis of each geometrical configuration when evolutive optimization algorithms are used.