Title: Structural optimization: challenges and opportunities

Authors: J. Sobieszczanski-Sobieski

Addresses: NASA Langley Research Center, Interdisciplinary Research Office, Hampton, Virginia, USA

Abstract: Recent developments in structural optimization, when taken collectively, promise informed practising engineers a quantum jump in their design capability. In this paper, the area of structural optimization is treated in the broader context of a vehicle design process with a focus on structural sizing. A basic introduction to a formal approach is given, and several application examples are illustrated to lay a background for the review of recent progress. The main developments discussed include techniques for reducing computational cost of optimization, methods for generating sensitivity information, and the way to make the computer implementations more practical. New prospects are presented for applying optimization to very large problems by formal decomposition into a number of smaller problems in a manner compatible with the trend toward distributed computing for the design process organized into specialty groups. Numerous references are quoted as points of entry to the vast literature on the subject.

Keywords: computational cost reductions; design oriented analysis; dimensionality reduction; structural optimisation; structural sizing; vehicle design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.1986.061151

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 1986 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.242 - 263

Published online: 25 May 2014 *

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