A Multi-Objective Topology Optimization Method For Light Structure Under Coupled Thermal-Mechanical Loads

With the rapid development of computer technique and Finite Element Method (FEM), the structure design's theory and method have been made a great progress, and becoming to be the necessary part of the modern design technique. The structure design method can make the best use of the material, improve the performance of the structure and so on. Furthermore, it can provide the decision maker with more selecting cases at the beginning of structure design. So it can reduce the design cost and abbreviate lead-time and so on. Meanwhile, people request more and more on the product's quality. The coupled effect of multiple physical fields always becomes the determining factor for the structural system and the quality of the product. The concept of multidisciplinary design optimization has been becoming more important in the structure design. How to make multi-objective optimization crossing interacting multi-disciplines becomes a new challenge for the designers.In this paper, a method is proposed by author based on the ANSYS Parametric Design Language (APDL). It applies an interval method to select element in the Evolutionary Structure Optimization method ( ESO ) , and recovers or deletes element by the"birth and dead"function of element. Another method viewed as second order smoothing technique for suppressing the checkerboard patterns has been proposed based on the filtering function's principle. Then the above methods are applied to solve a temperature-controlling problem in the steady heat conducting field and a multi-objective topology optimization problem considering multiple load cases and coupled effect. The numerical result has shown that the method is valid.