Comparison Between Two Different Computational Schemes for Stress Constraint in Topology Optimization

This paper presents and evaluates an approach for handling stress constraint in topological design. The Finite Element Method (FEM) and the Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP) is used to formulate the topology optimization. A new scheme is presented to evaluate the von Mises stress at the element centroids. A single P-norm integrated stress constraint is used to reduce the computational time. The stress constraint sensitivity is calculated by using the adjoint method. The optimization problem is solved by the Method of Moving Asymptotes (MMA). Two dimensional, plane elasticity problem is considered. The resulted topology shows the validity of the proposed approach.