FREE MATERIAL OPTIMIZATION VIA MATHEMATICAL-PROGRAMMING

This paper deals with a central question of structural optimization wh ich is formulated as the problem of finding the stiffest structure whi ch can be made when both the distribution of material as well as the m aterial itself can be freely varied. We consider a general multi-load formulation and include the possibility of unilateral contact. The emp hasis of the presentation is on numerical procedures for this type of problem, and we show that the problems after discretization can be rew ritten as mathematical programming problems of special form. We propos e iterative optimization algorithms based on penalty-barrier methods a nd interior-point methods and show a broad range of numerical examples that demonstrates the efficiency of our approach. (C) 1997 The Mathem atical Programming Society, Inc. Published by Elsevier Science B.V.