A computational method for design sensitivity analysis of elastoplastic structures (Q1913258)

Design sensitivity analysis of structural systems having elastoplastic material behavior is developed using the continuum formulation, and its implementation into a finite element program is described. The main idea is to develop a computational procedure for design sensitivity analysis based on the response obtained by an incremental load approach for nonlinear response analysis, where the elastoplastic (time-independent) constitutive model is employed to account for the plastic material behavior; i.e. kinematic hardening and isotropic hardening. Discontinuities in the design sensitivity coefficients are investigated and a procedure is proposed to alleviate them. The control/reference domain approach is used to treat shape and non-shape design variables simultaneously. The direct variation method is adopted for this path-dependent problem to obtain the design sensitivity expression for the response variables.