Abstract
This article is addressed to beginners as well as to advanced students in the recently established discipline of structural optimization. Structural optimization is not a theory of its own, but it makes extensive use of theoretical results from several research disciplines. Mechanical engineering and mathematical programming theory is necessary to develop a programming system for structural optimization. Some mechanical engineering background is essential to realize the formulation of the design problem. To understand how to set up the design model the user will be guided carefully from a simple example to the important class of displacement related constraints. Furthermore a brief discription of more general design problems is given to introduce the scope of mechanical fields that can be managed by the tools of structural optimization. The consideration of the common mathematical formulation of all kinds of problems leads to a simultaneous solution process. Both the classical Optimality Criteria (OC) approach as well as the use of Mathematical Programming (MP) algorithms can be seen as an attempt to solve the dual problem formulation. Not only the age-old polemical dispute between the OC and MP school of thought can be saddled by understanding the duality in structural design, but also the Sequential Convex Programming (SCP) technique can be deduced from it. Finally, ideas are presented how to exploit some special mathematical properties in the design formulation.
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Hörnlein, H.R.E.M. (1993). Structural Optimization. In: Hörnlein, H.R.E.M., Schittkowski, K. (eds) Software Systems for Structural Optimization. International Series of Numerical Mathematics, vol 110. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-8553-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-8553-9_1
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