Minimum weight design of sinusoidal corrugated web beam using differential evolution algorithm

Abstract

Due to their many advantages, corrugated steel plates are widely used in various applications including bridges. Starting with airplane design, these corrugated steel plates have been used in civil engineering applications such as buildings and bridges, and many studies on corrugated steel plates are being conducted. However, most of these studies focused on the strength of girders through analysis and experiment of corrugated steel plates and studies on the optimization of corrugated steel plates are still insufficient. The present study developed the weight optimum design using the differential evolution and investigated the effects of parameters. The optimization program was verified with differential evolution through the numerical analysis examples of simple beams and fixed beams. For this verification, the optimization program using the genetic algorithm that has been studied was compared with the weight optimum graph of the optimization program of differential evolution proposed in this study. As a result, the graphs of these two optimization programs increased similarly. The change rate was 3.57% or lower in the example of uniformly load for fixed beam, 1.60% or lower in the example of concentrated load for fixed beam, and 1.44% or lower in the example of uniformly load for simple beam. Furthermore, in the graph of changing design variables, the changing web thickness showed a similar trend as the increasing trend of the optimum sectional area.