Risk-averse structural topology optimization under random fields using stochastic expansion methods

Abstract

This work proposes a level-set based approach for solving risk-averse structural topology optimization problems considering random field loading and material uncertainty. The use of random fields increases the dimensionality of the stochastic domain, which poses several computational challenges related to the minimization of the Excess Probability as a measure of risk awareness. This problem is addressed both from the theoretical and numerical viewpoints. First, an existence result under a typical geometrical constraint on the set of admissible shapes is proved. Second, a level-set continuous approach to find the numerical solution of the problem is proposed. Since the considered cost functional has a discontinuous integrand, the numerical approximation of the functional and its sensitivity combine an adaptive anisotropic Polynomial Chaos (PC) approach with a Monte-Carlo (MC) sampling method for uncertainty propagation. Furthermore, to address the increment of dimensionality induced by the random field, an anisotropic sparse grid stochastic collocation method is used for the efficient computation of the PC coefficients. A key point is that the non-intrusive nature of such an approach facilitates the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) to alleviate the computational burden of the problem. Several numerical experiments including random field loading and material uncertainty are presented to show the feasibility of the proposal.