Development of a computational efficient tool for robust structural optimization. Issue 2 (20th April 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Motta, Renato de Siqueira; Afonso, Silvana Maria Bastos; Lyra, Paulo Roberto; Willmersdorf, Ramiro Brito
• Is Part Of: Engineering computations. Volume 32:Issue 2(2015)
• Page Start: 258
• Page End: 288
• Publication Date: 2015-04-20
• Subjects: Computer-aided engineering -- Periodicals; Computer graphics -- Periodicals; 620.00285
• DOI: 10.1108/EC-06-2013-0172
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0264-4401

Abstract

<abstract> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Purpose</title> <p> – Optimization under a deterministic approach generally leads to a final design in which the performance may degrade significantly and/or constraints can be violated because of perturbations arising from uncertainties. The purpose of this paper is to obtain a better strategy that would obtain an optimum design which is less sensitive to changes in uncertain parameters. The process of finding these optima is referred to as robust design optimization (RDO), in which improvement of the performance and reduction of its variability are sought, while maintaining the feasibility of the solution. This overall process is very time consuming, requiring a robust tool to conduct this optimum search efficiently. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Design/methodology/approach</title> <p> – In this paper, the authors propose an integrated tool to efficiently obtain RDO solutions. The tool encompasses suitable multiobjective optimization (MO) techniques (encompassing: Normal-Boundary Intersection, Normalized Normal-Constraint, weighted sum method and min-max methods), a surrogate model using reduced order method for cheap function evaluations and adequate procedure for uncertainties quantification (Probabilistic Collocation Method). </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Findings</title> <p> – To illustrate the application of the proposed tool, 2D structural problems are considered. The integrated tool prove to be very effective reducing the computational time by up to five orders of magnitude, when compared to the solutions obtained via classical standard approaches. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Originality/value</title> <p> – The proposed combination of methodologies described in the paper, leads to a very powerful tool for structural optimum designs, considering uncertainty parameters, that can be extended to deal with other class of applications.</p> </sec> </abstract>