Due to developments in additive manufacturing, the production of piezoelectric materials with complex geometries is becoming viable and enabling the manufacturing of thicker harvesters. Therefore, in this study a piezoelectric harvesting device is modelled as a bimorph cantilever beam with a series connection and an intermediate metallic substrate using the plain strain hypothesis. On the other...

In this paper a league championship algorithm (LCA) is developed for structural optimization where the optimization variables are of discrete type and the set of the values possibly obtained by each variable is also given. LCA is a relatively new metaheuristic algorithm inspired from sport championship process. In LCA, each individual can choose to approach to or retreat from other individuals ...

an evolutionary structural optimization (eso) method is used for plastic design of frames. based on safe theorems some criteria are derived and made an effort to satisfy them during the optimization process. in this regard, equilibrium is checked and yield condition is gradually satisfied during the optimization process. in this method, the amount of used material and the stiffness for each ele...

this study focuses on the optimization of the plane structure. sequential quadratic programming (sqp) will be utilized, which is one of the most efficient methods for solving nonlinearly constrained optimization problems. a new formulation for the second order sensitivity analysis of the two-dimensional finite element will be developed. all the second order required derivatives will be calculat...

well-known seismic design codes have offered an alternative equivalent static procedure for practical purposes instead of verifying design trials with complicated step-y-step dynamic analyses. such a pattern of base-shear distribution over the building height will enforce its special stiffness and strength distribution which is not necessarily best suited for seismic design. the present study, ...

due to the algorithmic simplicity, cellular automata (ca) models are useful and simple methods in structural optimization. in this paper, a cellular-automaton-based algorithm is presented for simultaneous shape and topology optimization of continuum structures, using five-step optimization procedure. two objective functions are considered and the optimization process is converted to the single ...

the synthesis of heat integrated multi-component distillation systems is complex due to its huge search space for structural combination and optimization computation. to provide a systematic approach and tools for the synthesis design of distillation systems, a new method for modeling heat integrated columns is presented, and the operating cost objective function is minimized by improved harmon...

This paper attempts to improve the computational efficiency of the well known particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for tackling discrete sizing optimization problems of steel frame structures. It is generally known that, in structural design optimization applications, PSO entails enormously time-consuming structural analyses to locate an optimum solution. Hence, in the present study it i...

this study is investigated the optimum parameters for a tuned mass damper (tmd) under the seismic excitation. shuffled complex evolution (sce) is a meta-heuristic optimization method which is used to find the optimum damping and tuning frequency ratio for a tmd. the efficiency of the tmd is evaluated by decreasing the structural displacement dynamic magnification factor (ddmf) and acceleration ...