摘要

A new bionic approach is presented to find the optimal topologies of a structure with tension-only or compression-only material based on bone remodelling theory. By traditional methods, the computational cost of topology optimization of the structure is high due to material nonlinearity. To improve the efficiency of optimization, the reference-interval with material-replacement method is presented. In the method, firstly, the optimization process of a structure is considered as bone remodelling process under the same loading conditions. A reference interval of Strain Energy Density (SED), corresponding to the dead zone or lazy zone in bone mechanics, is adopted to control the update of the design variables. Secondly, a material-replacement scheme is used to simplify the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of structure in optimization. In the operation of material-replacement, the original tension-only or compression-only material in design domain is replaced with a new isotropic material and the Effective Strain Energy Density (ESED) of each element can be obtained. Finally, the update of design variables is determined by comparing the local ESED and the current reference interval of SED, e.g., the increment of a relative density is nonzero if the local ESED is out of the current reference interval. Numerical results validate the method.