A numerical study on the elements of shape optimum design

This paper discusses the main elements of shape optimization. The material derivative of a stress function using the continuum approach is derived by introducing an adjoint problem, which is then transformed into shape design sensitivity by replacing the velocity field with the change of the design variables. The difficulty related with the appearance of the concentrated adjoint loads is discussed, with two proposals for the modelling of the adjoint problem. A numerical example is used to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed formulation for different adjoint loads. Two shape optimization examples are used to investigate the numerical characteristics of the optimization process. Two kinds of design boundary modelling are employed, namely the linear and cubic spline boundary representation. The difference of the final design shapes under different design variables and mesh distributions are also studied.