Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea ISSN:1229-3059(Print) 2287-2302(Online) 한국전산구조공학회 논문집

This papter presents the use of the automatic differential method based on the backpropagation method to obtain the design sensitivity and its application to topology optimization considering the stress constraints. Solving topology optimization problems with stress constraints is difficult owing to singularities, the local nature of stress constraints, and nonlinearity with respect to design variables. To solve the singularity problem, the stress relaxation technique is used, and p-norm for stress constraints is applied instead of local stresses for global stress measures. To overcome the nonlinearity of the design variables in stress constraint problems, it is important to analytically obtain the exact design sensitivity. In conventional topology optimization, design sensitivity is obtained efficiently and accurately using the adjoint variable method; however, obtaining the design sensitivity analytically and additionally solving the adjoint equation is difficult. To address this problem, the design sensitivity is obtained using a backpropagation technique that is used to determine optimal weights and biases in the artificial neural network, and it is applied to the topology optimization with the stress constraints. The backpropagation technique is used in automatic differentiation and can simplify the calculation of the design sensitivity for the objectives or constraint functions without complicated analytical derivations. In addition, the backpropagation process is more computationally efficient than solving adjoint equations in sensitivity calculations.