Title: Topology tailoring for relaxing thermal-stress concentration in heat resisting heterogeneous material objects

Authors: Yi Yang, Anping Xu, Yunxia Qu, Yuhong Liu

Addresses: School of Mechanical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Dingzigu No.1 Road, Hongqiao District, Tianjin 300130, P.R. China. ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Dingzigu No.1 Road, Hongqiao District, Tianjin 300130, P.R. China. ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Dingzigu No.1 Road, Hongqiao District, Tianjin 300130, P.R. China. ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Dingzigu No.1 Road, Hongqiao District, Tianjin 300130, P.R. China

Abstract: Recently, more and more attention has been paid to heterogeneous material objects due to their excellent properties of combining two or several desired incompatible functionalities within the same component. Many efforts have been made to develop a systematic and effective method for heterogeneous material objects design. This paper deals with modelling a kind of dual-phase heat resisting heterogeneous material objects, which simultaneously possesses heat resisting property in high temperature region and smooth thermal-stress distribution in the whole domain. The traditional evolutionary structural optimisation (ESO) algorithm is extended to tailor the optimum materials distribution in continuous fashion based on topology optimisation philosophy, without changing the geometrical topology. The extended ESO algorithm presented in this paper combines the advantages of homogenisation method and the traditional ESO algorithm. The computer program is written in ANSYS parameter design language (APDL) under the ANSYS environment. A simple example shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords: functional components; heterogeneous material object; FEA; finite element analysis; thermal stress concentration; heat resistance; topology optimisation; ESO algorithm; evolutionary structural optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDE.2008.021170

International Journal of Design Engineering, 2008 Vol.1 No.2, pp.192 - 207

Published online: 07 Nov 2008 *

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