Topology optimization considering stress and reliability constraints

In the past two decades, many researches have been carried out to study the structural topology optimization. Most of them focused on minimizing the mean compliance of structures under material volume constraint, but stress constraints are seldom considered in the problem formulations. So, the optimum structure may be not safe because the material failure criterion is not checked during optimization process. Even if stress constraints are considered, the optimum structure still could fail with high probability because the applied forces, material properties and many other design parameters could be random factors in reality. Hence, both stress constraints and random parameters should be considered to design an optimized structure with high reliability. This paper presents a procedure to implement Reliability-based based Topology Optimization (RBTO) considering stress constraints. Numerical examples show the impacts of stress constraint and random factors on the final topology of optimum structure.