This paper presents several equivalent formulations for a structural design problem where the load carrying capacity is maximized for a prescribed volume subject to bounds on complementary energy and stresses. This limit design model covers the full range of strictly elastic, elastic/plastic and strictly plastic designs and is based on the unified analysis model of Ben-Tal and Taylor [5]. While...

Numerical simulation technology has been used widely in plastic forming area. However, the simulation of increasingly complex forming process leads to the generation of vast quantities of data, which implies much useful knowledge. Consequently domain knowledge is very significant to product design and process development in metal plastic forming area. The paper presented a new robust optimizati...

Five methods are introduced for design of castellated I beams encased in concrete. One of the methods, plastic analysis, is thoroughly explained and the relevant equations are developed. Eight castellated I beams encased in concrete are made and tested. The theoretical design methods are all compared with the test results and the safety factor for each method is calculated. The results show tha...

A procedure based on MATLAB combined with ANSYS is presented and utilized for the multi-objective aerodynamic and structural optimization of horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) blades. In order to minimize the cost of energy (COE) and improve the overall performance of the blades, materials of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) combined with glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) are applied...

In this article optimal design of shear walls is performed under seismic loading. For practical aims, a database of special shear walls is created. Special shear walls are used for seismic design optimization employing the charged system search algorithm as an optimizer. Constraints consist of design and performance limitations. Nonlinear behavior of the shear wall is taken into account and per...

the nonlinear static pushover analysis technique is mostly used in the performance-based design of structures and it is favored over nonlinear response history analysis. however, the pushover analysis with fema load distributions losses its accuracy in estimating seismic responses of long period structures when higher mode effects are important. some procedures have been offered to consider thi...