Interactive re-analysis in mechanical design evolution. Part I. Background and implementation

The role of stress analysis in design is limited by the batch processing of single design geometries when subjected to prescribed load cases. While this approach is reasonable for detailed design, it limits the engineer in early stage design, when rapid availability of stress information for different geometries is perhaps more important than geometric precision. This paper presents structural re-analysis in a boundary element context, providing information on a suitable object-oriented structure, and giving details on the operations required when processing various types of re-analysis. Computational performance improvements (over a full analysis) of 50–80% are found, depending on the degree of perturbation to a pre-existing boundary element method model. An illustration, in which multiple modifications are made to different parts of a design geometry, shows how stress reduction and weight reduction may be achieved as analysis results guide the design in the concept stage.