Minimization of maximum unilateral force Original Research Article

The paper treats the structural optimization problem of minimizing forces arising from unilateral contact, and/or non-compressive constraints. We formulate this design problem as a mathematical program with complementarity constraints and establish some analytical results that pertain to the existence of an optimal design and the first-order necessary conditions for such a design. We apply three numerical algorithms and compare their performance on several examples. The computational result suggest that together these algorithms are well suited for solving this class of structural optimization problems.