Topology Optimization of Plane Structures using Modal Strain Energy for Fundamental Frequency Maximization

Abstract

This paper describes a topology optimization technique which can maximize the fundamental frequency of the structures. The fundamental frequency maximization is achieved by means of the minimization of modal strain energy as an inverse problem so that the strain energy based resizing algorithm is directly used in this study. The strain energy to be minimized is therefore employed as the objective function and the initial volume of structures is used as the constraint function. Multi-frequency problem is considered by the introduction of the weight which is used to combine several target modal strain energy terms into one scalar objective function. Several numerical examples are presented to investigate the performance of the proposed topology optimization technique. From numerical tests, it is found to be that the proposed optimization technique is extremely effective to maximize the fundamental frequency of structure and can successfully consider the multi-frequency problems in the topology optimization process.