에어컨 배관 시스템의 형상 최적설계

Abstract

Ensuring both product quality and reducing material cost are important issue for the design of the piping system of an air conditioner outdoor unit. This paper describes a shape optimization that achieves mass reduction of an air conditioner piping system while satisfying two design constraints on resonance avoidance and the maximum stress in the pipes. In order to obtain optimized design results with various analysis fields considered simultaneously, an automated multidisciplinary analysis system was constructed using PIAnO v.2.4, a commercial process integration and design optimization(PIDO) tool. As the first step of the automated analysis system, a finite element model is automatically generated corresponding to the specified shape of the pipes using a morphing technique included in HyperMesh. Then, the performance indices representing various design requirements (e.g. natural frequency, maximum stress and pipe mass) are obtained from the finite element analyses using appropriate computer-aided engineering(CAE) tools. A sequential approximate optimization(SAO) method was employed to effectively obtain the optimum design. As a result, the pipe mass was reduced by 18 % compared with that of an initial design while all the constraints were satisfied.