A Moving Morphable Component Based Topology Optimization Approach for Rib-Stiffened Structures Considering Buckling Constraints

Stiffened structures are widely used in industry. However, how to optimally distribute the stiffening ribs on a given base plate remains a challenging issue, partially because the topology and geometry of stiffening ribs are often represented in a geometrically implicit way in traditional approaches. This implicit treatment may lead to problems such as high computational cost (caused by the large number of design variables, geometry constraints in optimization, and large degrees-of-freedom (DOF) in finite element analysis (FEA)) and the issue of manufacturability. This paper presents a moving morphable component (MMC)-based approach for topology optimization of rib-stiffened structures, where the topology and the geometry of stiffening ribs are explicitly described. The proposed approach displays several prominent advantages, such as (1) both the numbers of design variables and DOF in FEA are reduced substantially; (2) the proper manufacture-related geometry requirements of stiffening ribs can be readily satisfied without introducing any additional constraint. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is further demonstrated with numerical examples on topology optimization of rib-stiffened structures with buckling constraints.