SOME RESULTS ON OPTIMAL TOPOLOGY DESIGN OF TRUSS WITH UNILATERAL CONTACT CONSTRAINTS

The optimal topology design of truss structures concerning stress and frictionless unilateral contact displacement constraints is investigated. The existence of ununique optimal solution under contact gaps is found. This shows that the contact conditions have an effect on structural topology, and different initial contact gaps may lead to different structural topologies. To avoid the singular optima in structural topology optimization in multiple loading cases, an ε-relaxed method is adopted to establish the relaxing topology optimization formulations. The problem is solved by means of a two-level optimization method. In the first sublevel, the solution of the frictionless unilateral contact problem is obtained by solving an equivalent quadratic programming. In the second sublevel, topology optimization of truss is carried out by an ε-relaxed method. The validity of the method proposed is verified by computational results. Supported by the Postdoctoral Science and Research Foundation of Shanghai, China.