This paper on "Recent Improvements in Topology and Shape Optimisation and the Integration into the Virtual Product Development Process" was presented at the NAFEMS World Congress on The Evolution of Product Simulation From Established Methods to Virtual Testing & Prototyping - 24-28 April 2001, The Grand Hotel, Lake Como, Italy.

Introduction to Paper

Due to the demand to decrease the time-to-market of new products while maintaining a high quality level and reducing overall product development costs, structural optimisation tools have become of significant importance in the virtual product development process. These tools like topology and shape optimisation have reached wide spread acceptance as stand-alone applications in the CAE environment, but a closer integration in the product development chain is still desirable. To achieve this, FE-Design is leader of a subproject with industry partners like Porsche, Audi, Bosch and Keiper within the German research project "Integrated Virtual Product Creation''.
FE-Design offers with the optimisation system CAOSS an integrated solution for structural optimisation. CAOSS is successfully used in industry with an interface to MSC.Nastran under the product name MSC.Construct since 1997. Now, FE-Design has developed further interfaces to the solvers ABAQUS, ANSYS, IDEAS and MSC.Marc. Structural optimisation of real-world problems was up to now limited to linear analysis only. With the interfaces to the non-linear solvers ABAQUS and MSC.Marc it is now also possible to perform structural optimisation with moderate non-linearities.
After an introduction into the optimisation system CAOSS the integration of the structural optimisation into the development process is shown. Then an application of shape optimisation with hyperelastic material from the company Freudenberg is given. It follows an example for topology optimisation with contact boundary conditions. Finally an industrial applications of topology optimisation using MSC.Construct at Porsche is presented.