OPTIMAL FASTENER PATTERN DESIGN CONSIDERING BEARING LOADS

摘要

In many engineering structures, failure occurs either at thernconnection itself or in the component at the point of attachmentrnof the connection. To extend the service life of the structure it isrnimportant to ensure that the loads borne by the connections arerndistributed as uniformly as possible. This would also minimizernthe possibility of localized high stress regions within the component.rnIn this work a topology optimization based approach hasrnbeen developed to incorporate fastener load constraints into arnproblem formulated for optimal location of fasteners. The computationalrnresults indicate that it is effective in reducing thernmaximum fastener loads without compromising on the overallrnstiffness of the structure.