Reanalysis-based optimal design of trusses

This paper presents a structural reanalysis method and its applications in optimal design of trusses. This reanalysis technique is derived primarily on the basis of a reduced basis formulation, and it has several advantages over previous reduced basis methods. In particular, the reduced system is uncoupled by using a Gram{Schmidt orthonormalization procedure and an error measure is introduced to adaptively monitor whether a good approximate solution is achieved. The latter aspect makes this reanalysis method suitable for use in optimal design problems because the changes in design variables usually vary during a design process. Discussions are presented on the implementation of this reanalysis method using both mathematical programming and optimality criteria-based optimization schemes. Finally, several example problems of optimal truss design are used to validate the proposed reanalysis-based design procedure. The presented numerical results indicate that the new reanalysis technique a ects very slightly the accuracy of the optimal solutions and it does speed up the design process when the system analysed is large.