Sensitivity analysis of structures

Abstract

The objective of design sensitivity analysis is to calculate gradients of the structural responses and cost functions with respect to small changes of the design variables. The determination of the gradients of the objective function and the constraints is a highly important step in the optimization process (see Fig. 15.4), since these gradients are not only a prerequisite for the majority of optimization algorithms (see Chapter 16), but they also provide important information on the structural sensitivity when changing arbitrary structural parameters. The choice of an appropriate method of sensitivity analysis strongly influences the numerical efficiency and thus has impact on the entire course of the optimization. For this reason, the treatment of the fundamentals of structural optimization shall be dealt with separately with some remarks on frequently applied techniques for determination of gradients.