A new method based on adaptive volume constraint and stress penalty for stress-constrained topology optimization

This paper focuses on the stress-constrained topology optimization of minimizing the structural volume and compliance. A new method based on adaptive volume constraint and stress penalty is proposed. According to this method, the stress-constrained volume and compliance minimization topology optimization problem is transformed into two simple and related problems: a stress-penalty-based compliance minimization problem and a volume-decision problem. In the former problem, stress penalty is conducted and used to control the local stress level of the structure. To solve this problem, the parametric level set method with the compactly supported radial basis functions is adopted. Meanwhile, an adaptive adjusting scheme of the stress penalty factor is used to improve the control of the local stress level. To solve the volume-decision problem, a combination scheme of the interval search and local search is proposed. Numerical examples are used to test the proposed method. Results show the lightweight design, which meets the stress constraint and whose compliance is simultaneously optimized, can be obtained by the proposed method.