MECHANICAL DESIGN-PROBLEMS WITH UNILATERAL CONTACT

We formulate two problems of optimal design for mechanical structures in unilateral contact: the truss topology problem and the material des ign problem for elastic bodies. In both cases we consider general mult i-load fomulations, where for each load-case we may have different set of contact constraints (rigid obstacles). We show that both problems (after discretization of the latter one) can be rewritten as mathemati cal programs, which only differ in the character of the input data but otherwise have identical structure and thus allow the same algorithmi c approach. We propose an iterative optimization algorithm based on pe nalty-barrier methods. A series of numerical examples demonstrates the usability and efficiency of our approach. (C) Elsevier, Paris.