Topology optimal design of thermo-elastic structures

This paper investigates the topology optimization of thermo-elastic structure for maximizing the structure stiffness with the volume constraint and the uniform temperature distribution. Firstly, the influence of both the thermal loading and the mechanical loading on optimal design is studied. Secondly, Comparison of the effect of eliminating the intermediate density between power law SIMP (solid isotropic material with penalization) and RAMP (rational approximation of material properties) is made. The difficulties of the non-monotonous behavior of the compliance and the intermediate density of optimal solution arise from the same penalization to both the temperature loadings and the force loadings. To resolve these problems, the new approach with the different penalization to the different loading is developed to eliminate the intermediate density. Numerical results show that the proposed method is valid for the design of thermo-elastic structure.