Structural Optimization Techniques Combined With Meshless Methods: A Review

• Autor(a) principal: Castro, António Pedro Gonçalves de
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/18219
• topic: Structural optimization; Topology optimization; Meshless methods; Finite element method; Optimização estrutural; Optimização topológica; Métodos sem malha; Método dos Elementos Finitos

Structural optimization has been growing in recent years, as it is an excellent tool to obtain reliable and high-performance products. In addition to reducing the waste of resources and emissions as well as the production cost, this can be applied in several areas from engineering to medicine. The numerical method most used in recent decades to obtain structurally optimized parts is the finite element method (FEM) and it is included in the group called mesh-based methods. However, the application of these methods in parts with complex geometries and in large deformation problems result in low accuracy and instable solutions. In order to solve this problem, in the last decades, methods that are independent of a mesh have been developed to obtain unknown variables, called meshless methods. Although meshless methods are still recent and there are few documentations, these have been showing good results compared to the mesh-based methods, proving to be a good alternative. Considering what has been said previously, this work has as main objective the study and analysis of parts subjected to structural optimization using mesh-based and meshless methods, in order to compare the results and verify the benefits of using a type of method instead of the other.