Evolutionary material translation: a tool for the automatic design of low weight, low stress structures

EMERGE is a fully automatic and highly exible program for producing low-weight, low-stress structures, developed by the self-designing structures project at Newcastle and Durham Universities. A brief review of the development and features of existing evolutionary methods is rst given before going on to discuss evolutionary material translation (EMT)|the core algorithm embedded within EMERGE|and its relative advantages. Most of the existing work done on automatic evolutionary methods has concentrated upon material removal only, the main drawback of this approach being its inability to nd improved structural forms outside a predetermined domain. Three notional problems and one industrial problem are presented. These problems demonstrate the exibility of EMT to design outside or within the preconceptions of the engineer, to produce improved structures with superior boundaries, and to do so with modelling and computational e ciency.