SHAPE DESIGN SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF POINT STRESS CONSTRAINTS ON THE BOUNDARY OF LINEAR ELASTIC-SYSTEMS

In this paper, a method of shape design sensitivity analysis of point stress constraints on the boundary of linear elastic systems is presen ted. Constraints on point stress at the boundary are first transformed to constraints on an unsmoothed stress functional defined on the doma ins of finite elements that include the point, using the local smoothi ng met for stress, which is widely adopted for post-processing analysi s results in the finite element method. The material derivative idea a nd an adjoint variable technique are then employed for shape design se nsitivity analysis of the constraints. Validity of the method is teste d through a numerical example. It is shown that the method is stable, with accurate shape design sensitivity results, and readily applicable to practical structural shape optimization for linear elastic systems .