A simple approach towards fully stressed design in hyperelasticity exploiting the isoparametric finite element concept

A novel approach towards fully stressed designs in hyperelasticity is discu ssed leading to closed-form expressions for the sensitivities of the object ive and displacements with respect to design variations. The key idea is th e modification of the classical approach coupled with a so-called design el ement method offering a lot of parallelism to standard finite element metho ds. We bypass implicit constraints on dependent quantities and derive an ex plicit linearly constrained optimization problem solved by means of first-o rder procedures. The results obtained with the proposed method are adequate from an engineering point of view though being computed with a simple meth od. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.