Optimisation of Structures with Inelastic Deformations

In context of design optimisation, the treatment of inelastic, path-dependent materials is a topic of interest. As opposed to purely elastic materials, it is necessary to store and analyse the deformation history in order to appropriately describe inelastic material behaviour. For design optimisation of structures sensitivities of all quantities of influence have to be computed so as to use gradient based optimisation algorithms. Considering path-dependent materials the sensitivities of internal variables that represent the deformation history have to be additionally calculated. A numerical effective way of determining sensitivities is the variational sensitivity analysis. This approach is applied to develop a powerful and effective algorithm to compute sensitivities of the structural response with respect to their geometric design. (© 2016 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)