Geometry-based structural optimization on CAD specification trees

This thesis has been conducted in response to increasing corporate needs regarding virtual design process automation. Current design processes are already strongly based on virtual representations of the respective product, substituting costly hardware prototype build-up and testing. This allows for a multitude of simulations for verification and optimization to be carried out on such Digital Mock-Ups (DMU). However, despite the wide-spread use of such simulation tools, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), and virtual product data, the entire design process is still a highly time-consuming task requiring a multitude of iterative manual steps. Thus, considering nowadays sophisticated design and simulation tools, it would be neglectful not to benefit from such a basis to especially exploit its potential for automated comprehensive structural optimization a key component of design process automation. Focusing on the digitized product geometry, i.e. the CAD model, this thesis introduces a new approach to comprehensive automated structure variation and optimization based on these highly constrained CAD geometries. The work provides a new level of flexibility for the presently rather restricted structure optimization methods in this field, including the considerable advantage of optimized ready-to-use CAD solutions. Concepts, dedicated tools and algorithms are presented and combined to a highly flexible framework for general geometry-based structural optimization. The new framework is integrated into an industrial environment along with a set of solutions to automate nowadays time-consuming manual steps in corporate design processes. This combination yields a fully automated variation, simulation and assessment loop for CAD-based structural optimization. Furthermore, it allows for highly efficient systematic geometry variation and assessment, impracticable with present manual design processes. With the successful introduction of such a structural variation and assessment loop and the possibility of comprehensive geometry-based structural optimization, the thesis is concluded by an outlook towards further application possibilities of this concept. In this last step, the application to advanced CAD spline shape optimization as well as basic geometry-based structure creation are investigated. The presented work is based on the hierarchical representations of the geometrical models, the specification trees, which are additionally provided by most of nowadays commercial CAD tools. Using these trees to access the