Evolutionary structural optimisation using an additive algorithm

Abstract

The evolutionary structural optimisation (ESO) method has been under continuous development since 1992. Traditionally, the method was conceived from the engineering perspective that the topology and shape of structures were naturally conservative for safety reasons and therefore contained an excess of material. To move from the conservative design to a more optimum design would therefore involve the removal of material. Thus the ESO method started from a design space much bigger than the optimum and the final topology or shape emerged by a process of removal of unwanted/inefficient/lowly stresses material. The original algorithms allowed for two forms of evolution. One was there the understressed material could be removed from anywhere in the allowable design space, and with compensation for checker-boarding this produces an optimum topology under the prescribed environments. The second form only allows removal from the surface or parts of the surface (called nibbling in the ESO lexicon); this produces a Min–Max situation where the maximum surface stress is reduced to a minimum. It has been demonstrated that the ESO process produces a surface that is an iso-stress contour thus satisfying the Min–Max optimality criterion. The present paper addresses the opposite evolutionary process whereby the structure evolves from a base which is the minimum structural form required to carry the load regardless of the magnitude of the stress levels. Material is added in the proximity of high stress to ameliorate its effect and hence the final structural form emerges. Only singly connected regions are formed in the present analysis and thus the additive ESO process is the opposite of the nibbling SO, mentioned above, that produces optimum surface shapes. The paper presents a brief background to the current state of structural optimisation research. This is followed by a discussion of the strategies for the additive ESO (AESO) algorithm and two examples are presented.