Stress Minimization of Structures Based on Bidirectional Evolutionary Procedure

This paper develops a method for dealing with the stress minimization of continuum structures based on the bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) method. The modified p-norm approach has been used to assemble all the local stresses in one global function for saving computational cost. The BESO method has been extended for the p-norm stress minimization while the volume constraint has been satisfied for the specified value. For updating the discrete design variables, the elemental sensitivity numbers have been derived where the sensitivity filtering approach has been used. To validate the proposed method, numerical examples including the L-bracket, cantilever, and Eyebar beams are presented. Compared with the traditional stiffness optimization, the stress-based topology optimization developed in this paper significantly alleviates the maximum stress of the optimized design.