A ONE SHOT APPROACH TO TOPOLOGY

OPTIMIZATION WITH LOCAL STRESS CONSTRAINTS

One shot approach to topology optimization
Roman Stainko and Martin Burger
1 Special Research Project SFB F013, University of Linz, Austria.
2 Industrial Mathematics Institute, University of Linz, Austria
roman.stainko@jku.at, martin.burger@jku.at

Abstract
We consider the topology optimization problem with local stress constraints.
In the basic formulation we have a pde-constrained optimization problem, where
the finite element and design analysis are solved simultaneously. Here we introduce a new relaxation scheme based on a phase-field method. The starting
point of this relaxation is a reformulation of the constraints of the optimization problem involving only linear and 01 constraints. The 01 constraints are
then relaxed and approximated by a Cahn-Hillard type penalty in the objective
functional. As the corresponding penalty parameter decreases to zero, it yields
convergence of minimizers to 01 designs. A major advantage of this kind of
relaxation opposed to standard approaches is a uniform constraint qualification
that is satisfied for any positive value of the penalization parameter.
After the relaxation we end up with a large-scale optimization problem with
a high number of linear inequality constraints. Discretization is done by usual
finite elements and for solving the resulting finite- dimensional programming
problems an interior-point method is used. Numerical experiments based on
different stress criteria attest the success of the new approach.
To speed up computational times we investigated the construction of an optimal solver for the arising subproblem in the interior-point formulation.

Keywords:

1.

Topology Optimization, Local Stress Constraints, Phase-Field Methods, OneShot Methods, KKT-System.

Introduction

In comparison to maximization of material stiffness at given mass, the treatment of minimization of mass while keeping a certain stiffness is by far less
understood. Until now there seems to be no approach that is capable of com-

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puting reliable (global) optima with respect to local stress constraints within
reasonable computational effort.
In our work we use a different approach to the relaxation of the local constraints. Starting point of our analysis is a reformulation of the equality constraints describing the elastic equilibrium and the local inequality constraints
for stresses and displacements into a system of linear inequality constraints.
The main difficulty is that the arising problem also involves 01 constraints in
addition to the linear inequalities. Instead of solving mixed linear programming problems, we propose to use a phase-field relaxation of the reformulated
problem. The phase-field relaxation consists in using an interpolated material density , similar to material interpolation schemes. In addition, a CahnHilliard type penalization functional (cf. [3]) of the form

P () =
2

||2 dx +

W () dx

(1)

is used to approximate the perimeter, where W : R R {+} is a scalar

function with exactly two minimizers at 0 and 1 satisfying W (0) = W (1) =
0. The second term of the penalty functional ensures that the values of the
material density converge to 0 or 1 as 0, while the first term controls the
perimeter of level sets of .

2.

Reformulation of Constraints and PhaseField

Relaxation

We consider the following problem formulation as a starting point of our

reformulation:
Z
dx min

div = 0
= C : e(u)
u=0
n =t
n=0
{0, 1}
min max
umin u umax

,u

in { = 1}
in
on u
on t
on { = 1} ( u t )
a.e.
in { = 1}
in

In the following we briefly summerize a reformulation, due to Stolpe and Svanberg [6], of constraints on subsets of locally bounded stresses, i.e., |ij |
1, in , i, j = 1, . . . , d, for some (small) > 0. Next we introduce an additional artificial stress variable s such that s = if = 1 and s = 0 if = 0,

A one shot approach to topologyoptimization with local stress constraints

i.e., s = = C : e(u). Then, (, u) satisfying the original constraints

= C : e(u)
in
min max in { = 1}
is equivalent to (, u, s) satisfying the following additional constraints (with
the matrix 1 = (1)ij ):
(1 )1 (C : e(u) s) (1 )1 in
min s max
in
Note that (except {0, 1}) the constraints are now linear with respect to the
new vector of unknowns (, u, , s), in particular all constraints are formulated
on and not on the unknown set { = 1}. We would like to mention that
the drawback of the reformulation is an increase in the number of unknowns
and a high number of inequality constraints. On the other hand, this seems to
be a reasonable price for the linear reformulation of the complicated original
constraints.
We now turn our attention to the relaxation of the stress constrained topology optimization problem. For this sake is has been proposed in [5] to replace
the indicator function by a density : [0, 1] and add the CahnHillard
term (1) to the objective. The resulting relaxation in the case of total stress
constraints is given by
R
dx + P () min,
div s = 0
in ,
= C : e(u)
in ,
u=0
on D ,
sn=t
on N ,
(2)
sn =0
on D N ,
(1 )1 ( s) (1 )1
in ,
min s max
in ,
01
a.e. in ,
umin u umax
in .
It is now possible to show for the relaxed problem the existence of a solution, and that the discretized problem satisfies the linear constraint qualification
condition.

3.

Numerical Realization

Usual finite element discretization with linear elements for and u and
constant elements for s lead to a very large scale optimization problem. In
[5], we solve the discretized problem with IPOPT used as a black-box routine,

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which is realizing a primal-dual interior point method. Nevertheless, the algorithm behaves robust and produces reliable results. One test example shows
the following picture where the left part shows the load condition, bearings and
geometry and the left one the optimal design with respect to local von Mises
constraints.

Here set = 2 and started the -continuation with 0 = 1 where decreased

over 4 levels as l+1 = l /4. A mesh with 17291 elements results finally
in a problem with 355097 unknowns and 242502 constraints (including slack
variables).
One possibility to speed up the calculation is to construct a solver for the
linear KKT-system, which results from the interior-point formulation, with optimal complexity. This can be done using a multi-grid approach with a multiplicative Schwarz-type smoother (see e.g. [4]). Here we list the numerical
results for = = 0.1 with a W-cycle and 1 pre- and post-smoothing step,
error reduction by a factor of 108 :
Level
4
5
6
7
8

Unknowns
725
2853
11333
45189
180485

Iterations
18
10
11
11
11

Conv. Factor
0.35
0.14
0.17
0.18
0.18

References
[1] G.D.Cheng, Z.Jiang, Study on topology optimization with stress constraints, Engineering
Optimization 20 (1992), 129-148.
[2] G.D.Cheng, X.Gou, -relaxed approach in topology optimization, Structural Optimization 13 (1997), 258-266.
[3] J.W.Cahn, J.E.Hilliard, Free energy of a nonuniform system. I. Inter- facial free energy,
J. Chem. Phys. 28 (1958), 258-267.
[4] J.Schberl, W.Zulehner, On Schwarz-type Smoothers for Saddle Point Problems, Numer.
Math. 95 (2003), 377-399.
[5] R.Stainko, M.Burger, PhaseField Relaxation of Topology Optimization with Local
Stress Constraints, SFB-Report 04-35 (SFB F013, University Linz, 2004), and submitted.
[6] M.Stolpe, K.Svanberg, Modeling topology optimization problems as linear mixed 0-1
programs, Int. J. Numer. Methods Eng. 57 (2003), 723-739.