Black-box structural optimization of a mechanical component

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we wish to bring to the attention of the Industrial Engineering community a challenging industrial problem, black-box structural design, which cannot currently be satisfactorily addressed by professional software for topology optimization. The constraint functions considered here are non-linear and implicit, their evaluation requires the resolution of a computation-intensive finite-element analysis performed by a black-box commercial structural mechanics software such as MSC/Nastran. We present here a brief overview of topology optimization methods. Secondly, we propose a practical topology design heuristic methodology for handling such problems, which includes a new interpolation scheme for the fictive-material SIMP model. We present 3D computational experiments on a car component for Renault using a state-of-the-art public-domain nonlinear optimization software to drive the overall optimization process.