Abstract
This paper presents an approach for the topological design of multi-material compliant mechanisms with global stress constraints. The element stacking method and the separable stress interpolation scheme are applied to calculate the element stiffness and element stress of multi-material structures. The output displacement of multi-material compliant mechanisms is maximized under the constraints of the maximum stress and the structural volume of each material. The modified P-norm method is applied to aggregate the local von Mises stress constraints for all the finite elements to a global stress constraint. The sensitivities are calculated by the adjoint method, and the method of moving asymptotes is utilized to update the optimization problem. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The appearance of the de facto hinges in the optimal mechanisms can be suppressed effectively by using the topology optimization model with global stress constraints, and the stress constraints for each material can be met.
Highlights
Compliant mechanisms often refer to a family of mechanisms that gain their mobility through the flexibility of some or all of its members due to the elastic body deformation [1].Compared with the conventional rigid-body mechanisms, compliant mechanisms are featured with some unique benefits, such as easiness in fabrication, less wear and less backlash, requiring no lubrication and a built-in restoring force [2,3]
The aim of this paper is to develop a new approach for topology optimization of compliant mechanisms with multiple materials under global stress constraints
The output displacement of multi-material compliant mechanisms is maximized under the constraints of the maximum stress and the structural volume of each material
Summary
Compliant mechanisms often refer to a family of mechanisms that gain their mobility through the flexibility of some or all of its members due to the elastic body deformation [1]. Wang et al [24] applied a bi-level hierarchical optimization approach to perform topological design of compliant mechanisms with multiple materials. There are few studies about topology optimization of multi-material compliant mechanisms under stress constraints. Chu et al [34] applied the stress penalty method for topology optimization design of multi-material compliant mechanism. It gives rise to a topology optimization problem of multi-material compliant mechanisms with a large number of constraints. The aim of this paper is to develop a new approach for topology optimization of compliant mechanisms with multiple materials under global stress constraints.
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