A novel stress influence function (SIF) methodology for stress-constrained continuum topology optimization

This study presents a new stress influence function (SIF) methodology for continuum topology optimization under consideration of local strength failure. Firstly, the qp-relaxation criterion is involved to circumvent the stress singularity. To deal with the large-scale stress constraints in topology optimization, the local stress constraint is reflected in the objective along with the material volume by multiplication, and the weight of stress is characterized by stress influence function. Meanwhile, three types of stress influence functions are proposed for comparison. By means of the study on the characteristic of high-stress elements, the rationality of the SIF methodology is illustrated, in which the proposed method may achieve the full-stress state of high-stress element. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed methodology. It is shown that the proposed methodology can obtain reasonable results. Consequently, the proposed SIF methodology provides a novel strategy with high computational efficiency for topology optimization considering local strength failure.