Efficient Treatment of Constraints in Large-Scale Structural Optimization

The paper presents a new concept for the treatment of large numbers of stress and displacement constraints in finite dimensional optimal structural design. The idea is to replace a large number of stress and displacement constraints by a small number of equivalent functional constraints. The genesis of this concept is the distributed parameter and transient response structural design formulations where it has been used quite effectively. The major advantage of this constraint formulation is that design sensitivity vectors need to be calculated for only the reduced number of equivalent stress and displacement constraints. Thus, there is substantial computational advantage with the new formulation. Implications of the formulation are studied and several example problems are presented to show its potential in practical design applications.