Shape Optimisation of Structural Elements in Flexure for Deflection Control

This paper presents an analytical method for optimising the shape of statically determinate structural elements in flexure aiming at minimising the maximum deflection.This analytical method provides an efficient evaluation of the optimal section to add material needed for reducing the deflection.The detailed mathematical derivation of the analytical method is provided, including symmetric and unsymmetric cases.To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, an optimisation example is presented, which shows the proposed method has better performance than the existing method 1.The applicability of the proposed method is discussed at the end of the paper.