Abstract The scarcity of materials and environmental concerns made optimization techniques a valuable design tool for high‐performance and cost‐effective designs. In this context, a novel multi‐material topology optimization procedure based on Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural Optimization for plane stress problems is presented. The proposed methodology is divided into two loops: (i) it minimizes the structure's compliance and, consequently, reduces the weight of the structure for a given material volume constraint and (ii) it iteratively replaces concrete elements exceeding their strength limits by steel to achieve a safe design. Afterward, the reinforcement design process to define the required steel area takes place. Here, the equivalent principal forces, obtained from the finite elements classified as steel, are utilized to define this steel area. With this, a comparative analysis between the proposed structures and the reference one designed by the traditional strut‐and‐tie method can be performed. In this comparison, the final volume and weight are evaluated, as well as the structures' ultimate load. It allows the identification of potential failure modes and verifies the efficiency of the resulting topologies. Results show both innovative and resource‐efficient designs meeting structural demands.
Amaral et al. (Sat,) studied this question.
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