Adaptive Stiffness Design for Multimaterial Structural System

Abstract

Stiffness is one of the basic characteristics of structural system, and is an important feature for structural design problems. Although it has been often recruited as the design objective or constraints, the structural optimality attained has guarantee only for the mechanical conditions considered at the design stage. The adaptive stiffness design for force-dependent stiffness is a concept to tailor the structural stiffness in accordance with the external load applied. The passive adaptive stiffness has been realized by usingsingle conventional material only. In this article, it is evolved to the active one that enables us to switch the force-dependent stiffness actively in part in the context of the multimaterial structural system. The topology design problem is formulated for the distribution of conventional and functional materials under the constraints of mean compliance and its switchingpoint as the structure. The effectiveness of the proposed structural design concept is examined through numerical case studies solved by the SIMP method of topology design.